


A Name to Call the Devil By

by Unquiet_Grave



Category: Dead by Daylight (Video Game)
Genre: Biting, Blow Jobs, Canon-Typical Violence, Choking, Collars, Come Swallowing, Danny has a texting problem, Dom/sub Play, Dubious Consent, Eventual Smut, F/M, Knifeplay, Marking, Moths, Mysticism, New killer/survivor concept, Nonconsensual Filming, Not much to say except Danny is danny, Paranoia, Porn With Plot, Porn with Feelings, Possessive Behavior, Possessive Sex, Rough Kissing, Rough Sex, Stalking, Telepathic Bond, Totems and Spirits, Voyeurism, fire imagery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-07
Updated: 2020-02-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:55:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 30,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22164427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unquiet_Grave/pseuds/Unquiet_Grave
Summary: I am rotten, on the inside.This...‘existence’...as the others call it, this ‘half-life’, isn’t working out so well for me.I crave something more.She is craving a restraining order, a cease and desist, a-...Sorry for the confessional talk. I always get a little reflective, before I kill.The phone clatters to the floor. She snatches it up, sweating bullets. Machine oil bleeds into the keys. She hastily types back,Don’t. PLEASE.She raises her head. Listens out the busted window in this shell of a house where no family or couple has lived for ages. The air stinks of a bookstore crypt.Silence.She looks down. No new messages.Someone is about to die.
Relationships: Danny "Jed Olsen" Johnson | The Ghost Face/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 76





	1. The Hidden Meaning of 'Again'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _So he watches, studying with an owlish tilt of his mask, as three of the survivors creep their way toward the shack. The fourth, ah, she is almost hidden from his view._
> 
> _He squints. Almost._
> 
> _A swath of bright, yellow hair, the thin stem of their lily-white neck, peeks out the open doorway. Still asleep, an unwilling participant in their little game of life, blood, and death. But not for long. Simple comforts, sleep and safety, are a rarity reserved solely for the most victorious, the most...frustrating._
> 
> _A cutthroat life of toil and struggle, that of the survivor. He doesn’t envy her._
> 
> _He does, however, wonder what she did, to attract such especially bad luck. The Entity’s ire—not something anybody wants._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Update: Expanded the 'prequel' and split the chapters up a bit.
> 
> I'm all done editing now, promise! <3

_Streetlights flicker just for me  
Wake up, falling in a dream  
I hear a voice_

_She whispers secrets from the dead_

_(Light as a feather)_  
_Streetlights flicker just for me_  
_(Nothing lasts forever)_  
_Wake up, falling in a dream  
  
_-Chromatics, 'Light as a Feather'

* * *

From his view on the hilltop, Danny watches four sleepers emerge from a black slumber. 

He’s never had much trouble, seeing in the dark, given the right tools.

Now, in this realm of eternal night, his predator’s gaze highlights their prone oblivious bodies in the thick fog like the glare of an owl. One of several gifts the Entity has bestowed him. A generous god, for the most part. But not one to be trifled with.

The sleepers roll over. Rub their tired eyes. Sit up.

Like lightning, a quiet sort of panic hits them: it's happening.

_Again_.

A seemingly harmless word, a permanent incantation that binds them all together in this endless web of bloodsport.

_That was...okay,_ he thinks. Always self-critical. _I should really write this stuff down._

His lips curl, beneath the mask. He will never ever get tired of this ‘stuff’. Even if he _did_ have the occasional stray thought—one or two deviant ideas; hell, he’s always been a creative type—the Entity forbids it. It **chose** him. He was hired, in a certain fashion. Abducted by an unforgiving Eldritch monster in the sky which will not hesitate to punish him for any grievous errors or laziness.

Not unlike his old bosses, really. Good thing he’s used to working under intense pressure. **Deadlines**.

He prefers it that way.

In life, he was an underpaid journalist writing for a dying industry, trapped in a dimension of margins, limitations, and dried ink. Oh, but for a while, though, he had made those headlines _sing_ _._ He can still fondly recall the lines of people wrapped around the stands on the street corners in Philly, their breath merging in a cloud in the frigid January air, ignoring the summons of distant church bells to get their hands on something much darker, more juicier than the cautionary tales printed in their bibles.

His true face always on the front page of said papers.

Still perched on the hilltop, Danny sighs forlornly. Stuck on an island in the mist.

Sometimes, he misses it, the notoriety. The fearful, excited speculation in the grocery aisles, schools, the libraries and train stations. Being an omnipresence was never so satisfying.

He does so _love_ to hear his name, spoken from trembling lips, but nobody knows it! Nobody _fears it!_ And they can’t love (and worship) what they don’t fear!

Not to worry, though. He runs his tongue across his lips.

The ink is _always_ wetter on the other side. He can write his story however he wants, so long as he follows the rules. The margins have all been expanded; the doors all ripped open and the sheep ushered through.

The world has fragmented into a series of boundless hunting grounds. Setting is key, after all.

Before, he was only a writer with his tools and certain...passions. In here, he has been loaned the subtle powers of a god. A promotion he can’t afford to lose. A burden he so _gladly_ carries, tends to, like a dutiful caretaker to a beloved shrine.

So he watches, studying with an owlish tilt of his mask, as three of the survivors creep their way toward the shack.

The fourth, ah, she is almost hidden from his view. 

He squints. _Almost._

A swath of bright, yellow hair, the thin stem of their lily-white neck, peeks out the open doorway. Still asleep, an unwilling participant in their little game of life, blood, and death. But not for long. Simple comforts, sleep and safety, are a rarity reserved solely for the most victorious, the most...frustrating.

A cutthroat life of toil and struggle, that of the survivor. He doesn’t envy her.

He does, however, wonder what she _**did** ,_ to attract such especially bad luck. The Entity’s ire—not something anybody wants. 

Because the others find the shack, and freeze. They do not rush in to wake their slumbering comrade, instead looking to one another for direction.

Finally, the brawniest one shakes his head and points into the forest. They scatter like deer, leaving the bright-haired one all alone, a pale spark abandoned by the wayward wind.

Danny furrows his brow. He is no fool. Few things in this realm fall under the category of ‘wayward’. Maybe he’ll get around to investigating it.

Maybe not. The others are leaving plenty of traces as they attempt to 'sneak' through the woods. The brawny one’s in the lead, running at an athletic clip. _And they say cardio's good for one's health._

Meanwhile, sleeping beauty has yet to wake up in her fairytale hutch.

He decides, then and there, who will be his first tonight.

Poor little lamb. They don’t even know what’s coming.

Secretly, though, he hopes they **do**. He could _use_ a little more excitement. A challenge. But, if not, he’s content to be the Entity’s butcher boy. Wouldn’t want to let the boss down with bad copy.

It doesn’t want filler, after all. It wants, _craves_ violence. Bold headlines. Shock, awe, scandal, and maybe, just maybe, even a little _fascination._

A cloud scuds. The moon is ripe for killing.

Unsheathing his knife, he glides down the hill and begins.


	2. Nensha 念写

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The awful feeling in her stomach has turned into a full-blown case of paranoia, with a side of abandonment._
> 
> _Time drifts by. Leaves from the invisible canopy light on her shoulders and form little piles on top of the gen. A beam of moonlight breaks through the impossible barriers above her, helps her along._
> 
> _Instead of screams...crickets. An owl hooting, bold and baleful. Carrion crows, cawing for dinner and merriment._
> 
> _And was that...something breathing...just now?_
> 
> _**POP!** _
> 
> _The gen powers on, nearly startles her to death. She flees from the harsh glare of the floodlights before any noisy shadows can follow. Like a moth, she flits from place to place in the cold, wet dim. Lost and in search of flame._
> 
> _Or Red Riding Hood, on the lookout for the Wolf._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nensha (Japanese: 念写), is the claimed ability to "burn" images from one's mind onto surfaces such as photographic film by psychic means.[1]

She wakes to the soothing drum of rain on tin.

_Fuck, I overslept!_

She bolts up into a crouch. Her boots sneak and slide across the floorboards of the shack. Timidly, she peers out the shattered window.

To see the Entity has summoned her to a grim arcadia.

Dense fog carpets the gnarled roots of imposing trees. Their regal crowns disappear into the low cloud ceiling. No movement, just the occasional leaf cascades soundlessly to the forest floor. The foliage is dim and deprived, the sky a drab shade of old snow.

Mother’s Dwelling, they call it. There is nothing motherly about it.

This world belongs to the Huntress, but the Entity’s Chosen don’t discriminate between territories. Or victims. It’s anyone’s game.

So whose will it be today?

She doesn’t plan on finding out yet. Never be first; always stay hidden. A hard lesson she had to learn when she first crossed that hidden door into the Entity’s realm.

That was several (many) deaths ago.

Ah, nostalgia.

She finds the closest generator and kneels beside it, remembering the first time she tried to fix one, followed by the excited revving of a chainsaw.

Those were the early days.

_Never thought I’d think of my own death in a plural sense_.

Speaking of.

It’s awfully quiet. She pops her head above the gen and looks. Listens. Pulls herself together while she pulls machinery apart, tries to put it back together into something functional. She opens a compartment and grumbles when a jumble of wires falls out. The brains of the machine, all tangled and disarrayed. She sighs.

_No matter how many times I repair these things, it always feels absurd._

_Almost as absurd as being pulled by a giant, disgusting spider into the sky after suffering a brutal death on a hook_.

Alas, she’s compelled to repair. Rules of the game. They're nothing new to her.

The old rules she used to obey as a mortal with too many student loans and overdue bills and a long complicated list of ex-boyfriends no longer apply. Other than a few basic guidelines, anything goes. Strangely, it’s the ‘anything’ she loves and fears the most.

Maybe that was why she crossed over in the first place, to go somewhere wondrous. Some place limitless. She wouldn’t be the first lost soul to be lured in, whether by false promises, delusions of grandeur, or curiosity.

Accidents.

Horrors.

Or, she muses, maybe the Entity ‘chose’ her for its own reasons.

She connects the wrong wire, and it spits an orange spark in her face. A warning to pay attention.

_Then again, I doubt it_.

She shakes her head before she resumes her odd, mechanical surgery on the gen’s confusing innards. She has copied the other survivor’s techniques closely. Skills and tidbits, things she has picked up along the way.

Minutes pass. Mist gathers and dissipates. Rain continues to fall in shimmering curtains. She has yet to see or hear another soul in this peaceful purgatory.

That is the first sign.

Something’s wrong. Sweat gathers at the base of her spine, but she keeps to her task with an expert’s patience.

Halfway done, she tries to reassure herself. You’re gonna make it. Don’t worry; you’ve done this dozens of times now...died dozens of times, too, but who’s really counting?

Truth be told, she could use a week to rest. A good match, a win, might secure that for her.

It certainly trumps the alternative.

She frowns, pausing.

_Damn it. I’ve gone and lived long enough to be afraid to die again. That's what's happened_.

Her hand slips. There’s a loud bang, and the gen blasts meteors in her face.

She cringes, smoking, and lets the rainwater soothe her burns, and waits for the gen to stop backfiring. The silence, the lack of screams disturb her, but there’s nothing else to be done. No screams means people are plugging away elsewhere. Industrious gnomes. 

Usually. The bad feeling that’s been steadily growing twists her stomach into wire-tight knots.

Seems like it’s been following her for quite some time, this feeling. Like a shadow. Or a curse.

Maybe it’s just the ghost of Philip, peering over her shoulder.

“C’mon. Almost there,” she growls.

Finally, she tightens a bolt, flips a switch, and joins the split ends of the last wires. The power trips, the right lines suck down the right amounts of diesel, and it sputters to life.

Without so much as a cry of _Eureka!_ she runs off at a cautious pace, using the forest as cover.

** 

It doesn’t take long for her to realize something’s definitely not right. Her ears should be bombarded by gens popping. But there’s neither moan nor murmur from the others.

_Typical._

It’s been a while, but pure fear seeps into her spine, attacks her nervous system. She does her best to ignore it, tells herself she’s been in tighter squeezes than…

What was that!? 

She dives into a wooden jungle gym, heart racing. But it was only a branch thudding on top of a locker.

...everyone inexplicably disappearing. 

No need for them to all vanish at once. Usually, they just avoid her. And she has learned to avoid them.

But all this... _ **calm**..._is borderline ridiculous. Disturbing.

As fake as the hope she carries in her heart that this trial will end well.

**

Deeper and deeper she treads, finding only more silence. Emptiness. Loathsome little toadstools that she stomps and kicks with satisfaction. Claudette would have a heart attack.

She wanders straight to the heart of Mother’s Dwelling: Huntress’s cabin. A mighty blaze roars in the untended hearth. Deer skulls and animal pelts glower at her from the hollows of their furs on the walls. In short, it’s creepy, foreboding business as usual.

“Anybody hooome?” she calls. A waste of breath. The place is deserted.

Out of the corner of her eye, she spies the basement, evoking unpleasant memories of sticky floors and screeching hooks. She gives those ominous stairs a wide berth.

“I’ll come back later,” she mutters. “Bring some s’mores.”

Maybe a gun, God willing.

She starts to actually giggle, and claps a palm over her mouth. She’s heard the others mention that inside joke, more than once. Thinking of them, particularly Ash—permanently in mourning over the loss of his shotgun and chainsaw—she pauses under the antler chandelier, solemn.

Three other people counting on her, out in the fog while some psycho hunts them, and she’s in here, watching the fire.

Where she always seems to end up.

She sighs and turns her back on it. Though the flames crackle, attempting to bewitch her with their heat, their incense, and though the smoke and walls hum a song of safety, she doesn’t fall for the illusion, nor does she linger near the hole in the floor.

She goes back outside, and the rain intensifies, pummels her shoulders, completely soaks her shirt, jeans, and boots. Her bleached hair clings to her neck and shoulders, the feathery bangs flattened to wet yarn consistency against her pale face.

Rivulets of mascara and sanity sluice off with the rain, into the mud. She couldn’t care less as she strains her eyes against the muted gloom.

Because she wants to cry out, to scream: where is everybody?!

**

She hears footsteps by the gen next to the smoke hut. 

The animal carcasses, the pungent vapors no longer make her squeamish. They are just...in the way.

Then: soft, graceful thumps in the grass.

Hasty reactions will get her killed. She goes on working, like she doesn’t notice. Sometimes that throws them off and she can duck away at the last second.

Sometimes.

But then a young woman’s voice squeaks,

“Oh, er, thank God. It’s you!”

A wide-eyed Claudette Morel trots out of the mist, her green apron trailing behind her. She clutches her side and doubles over, pinning her glasses to her nose with her finger.

_Somebody really ought to fix those_.

“Are you hurt?” she asks quietly.

_We all have something broken, I guess._

“What? Nope! D-don’t need any healing. Listen, have you seen the others?” Claudette asks between gasps, like she’s marathoned the entire perimeter of the forest.

“No,” she whispers, without looking up. “You’re the first one.”

Unsure of what to make of that statement.

“And the killer?”

“If I did, I’d be running him to you and screaming by now,” she half-jokes. Half, because that’s happened before.

They are all hazards to each other.

Claudette chews her lower lip, muttering to herself, 

“Oh, God. I don’t like this. Where are the others? It’s Myers, isn’t it? But he’s usually chasing someone already.”

She doesn’t respond to the girl’s raving because she’s concentrating, and because she can sense Claudette’s infectious terror.

“Look, Claud, don’t worry about them yet. Give me a hand, will you? I promise I won’t blow it up in your face this time...”

But Claudette seems more perturbed by her request to buddy up. That, or she communed a little too closely with some magic mushrooms.

Whatever the reason, the young botanist starts to run off into the gray. A bolt of panic hits her, and she drops a gear with a clank, jamming her finger in the process.

“Ouch! HEY!” she shouts, as loud as she dares. She nearly slips as she jumps to her feet . “Where're you going? Come back!”

Claudette peeks over her own shoulder with an insincere smile. It's unnatural.

“Don’t follow me!” she insists. “You just stay _right_ there. I’ll, uh, find the others! Yeah. They can’t be far...”

“But we can finish this faster if-” she shuts her mouth. More wasted breath.

With a nymphlike flutter of her apron, Claudette’s disappeared into the fog.

The awful feeling in her stomach has turned into a full-blown case of paranoia, with a side of abandonment.

Time drifts by. Leaves from the invisible canopy light on her shoulders and form little piles on top of the gen. A beam of moonlight breaks through the impossible barriers above her, helps her along.

Instead of screams...crickets. An owl hooting, bold and baleful. Carrion crows, cawing for dinner and merriment.

And was that...something breathing...just now?

**POP!**

The gen powers on, nearly startles her to death. She flees from the harsh glare of the floodlights before any noisy shadows can follow. Like a moth, she flits from place to place in the cold, wet dim. Lost and in search of flame.

Or Red Riding Hood, on the lookout for the Wolf.

**

She gets her first glimpse of the devil. Naturally, he’s dressed in black and red.

She’s migrated back to the cabin roof. Maybe not the wisest move. It’s too close to the basement for comfort, but up there she should at least be able to see anyone.

Plus, she can listen to the fire inside, crackling merrily. Maybe absorb some heat by wishful osmosis.

The rooftop generator clicks and grinds amicably, a friendly scorpion. Easy going, even with everything rain-choked and slippery, and her frigid nerves thaw some. Over the gentle downpour she can smell smoke, beckoning her to come in. Sit down. Touch the flames.

Burn a while.

She shakes her head. _What am I thinking?_

She almost doesn’t see it: the violent rush of black and crimson streaking beneath a tree, into some bushes. If she hadn’t paused at the exact moment to scratch her nose, drawing an oil slick across it...

There. A triangle of red, gone in an instant.

Shit. Okay, don’t panic.

She feigns the repairs, cursing under her breath. Her fingers shake. She’s become distantly aware she’s out of her league, an astronaut strayed too far from the station, now being pulled by a black hole, tether trailing limply behind.

There are eyes on the back of her head. A chill lights up her spine. Slowly, she turns. Looks down at the forest floor.

A man in a mask, his head tipped with devil horns, peeks over the bushes. He ducks out of sight so fast she almost thinks she imagined it. But there is no mistaking that design: Munch’s _The_ _Scream_.

She’s found the killer.

Or rather, he’s found her.


	3. A Key to Pry Apart Your Locked Heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The hatch opens with a supernatural roar._
> 
> _"What, no goodbye?" She laughs into the wind. “Fine. Later, loser!”_
> 
> _Before she can jump, something shiny arcs overhead._
> 
> _She catches it on instinct, before she even realizes what it is: his camera._
> 
> _“Wouldn’t want to leave-” the Ghostface mutters, much deeper, more richer than she’d imagined, a bottomless well._
> 
> _The hatch calls to her, pulls on her clothes, begs her to leave._
> 
> _She ignores it._
> 
> _“-without seeing what happened to your friends, would you?”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hella edits to these first 3 chapters. Please bear with me; I am a mess. :D

So close. She grinds her teeth, squeezing a pipe so hard a screw slices her palm. Almost had it!

She takes a shuddering breath and withdraws her hands. Rules, rules, rules. Wouldn't want the Entity to 'remove' her prematurely because she broke its favorite commandment: Thou shalt not let survivors use weapons.

She’s bad enough luck to herself as it is. But she wants nothing more than to rip the parts out and hurl them at the creep who **_won't stop_** **_staring_** at her from below.

Except he _has_ stopped. The devil has vacated his den.

She abandons the gen, pressing her back against the wall, steeling herself. Ducking around the bend, she shuffles toward the rooftop entrance. Keeping quiet, even when her thumb snags on a hatchet mark and a splinter jams beneath her nail. A little present from the absentee Huntress. Even when they’re not here, they’re trying to kill her.

Childlike, she puts her thumb in her mouth. The taste of iron permeates as she peeps through the doorway, past the wooden steps, and she sees something down there.

A human shadow prowls across the foyer.

The bastard’s blocked her only way out! Had she misjudged the distance earlier? Or had he let her see him, knowing she would run this way?

Annoying, this one. He doesn’t make a move the entire trial until it’s massively inconvenient. Now she can’t get those dangling basement hooks out of her head, a graven image indeed.

She heaves a sigh and snarls, “How the fuck did you sneak up on me so fast?”

At her voice, he freezes. Tilts those plastic cadaverous eyes heavenward; sees her, a ghost of a young woman glaring down from the landing, all messy yellow hair, watery blue eyes, white skin.

The devil reaches, slow and dramatic, towards the leather drop sheath on his muscular thigh. With a broad, smart arc, he whips out the most macabre knife she’s ever seen.

He looks at her again. Nods.

She gulps, and the taste of blood intensifies.

Their first greeting. Everything that happens next, moves for her in frames and clicks like a battered film reel. 

He raises the knife, swooping towards her, the shredded tatters of his costume billowing, long legs pumping like a bellows.

Before he can even touch her, something pierces. A ring of fire encircles her chest, lassos it, and pulls tight. She can’t breathe.

_No. No no no NO...get away. Get away from me!_

She reels, tries to flee. Feels a rush of cool, dark clouds slithering against her neck.

He drops his night shroud. A whoosh, and suddenly everything is full volume, the thud-thud-thud of his boots traversing the final steps like savage drum beats.

Her shoe comes to rest on the roof’s edge. She doesn’t remember how she got there, but there’s still ti-

“Aiiee!” she shrieks.

The knife rips into the back of her jacket—right between the shoulder blades—as she leaps from the second story.

He’s clipped her wings.

She goes down, hard. Molars click; a little chunk of her tongue breaks off. An appetizer for the Entity.

She drops into a clumsy roll, and the thick grass acts like a net, catching her.

From the rooftop ledge, she hears a low chuckle.

 _Oh, that’s real funny, huh?_ She thrashes to her feet, comes up spitting blood and dirt. She wipes clay and blades of grass off her cheek with the back of her hand and flicks it off. _Hilarious!_

Now it's her turn to look up, just in time to catch the killer sauntering over to her generator. He puts on a show, brutally kicking and stomping it. While it sparks and sputters, he crouches like a gargoyle on a Cathedral balcony.

And stares.

 _Whatever, weirdo._ She stares back, though her courage is slipping.

He’s just so... **intense**...and creepy.

She wipes blood from her lips, thinking. Something familiar about this one, though she's never faced him before.

 _Is he a nightmare I had, or am I losing my mind? Can’t believe I almost let him get the jump on me like that_.

Still. He’s up there; she’s on the ground, flesh-wound-free. His expression never changes, but he doesn’t seem pleased.

 _Good_. She smiles. Gives him a waggle of her fingers.

“Darn! Shoot. So close. Better luck next time!” she sings. She’s being a bitch, but she doesn’t care. Besides, he isn’t responding to her torments. 

Maybe he's new. They all were, once.

These little breaks in routine, these anomalies in an endless cycle of repetition thrill her. Human killers are somehow less intimidating than inter-dimensional beasts and mutants. At least she knows how most humans will react and think.

Or she believes she does. Any second now, he’ll be huffing and puffing after her.

Yes, any second.

She cranes her neck, just in case. After all, she’s been wrong befo-

**Click!**

A blinding flash, and her vision erupts. Between angelic blobs and floating wisps, he’s hovering there in the yard, perched where she landed (flopped). He must have leapt down from the second story like a panther from its branch.

...and after its prey. The itch to run and hide is overpowering, but it is she who cannot stop watching him now.

Because he does something _truly_ bizarre, something she’s never seen: he lowers the source of the flash, a small, silver digital camera. Checks something, trifling with the buttons.

And she thought Amanda and her little fetish traps were weird.

“Hey, asshole!” she squawks. “Don’t you know that’s rude, taking pictures without permission?”

He looks up, as if suddenly remembering she’s there.

Bullshit. He _**knows** _ she’s still there, hiding in the weeds. Can probably smell her like a scenthound smells a rabbit.

Then, she blinks, and he’s gone.

Dematerialized to atoms swirling in her head, burning a fiendish image there. Demonic thoughtography.

He's many things, but 'new' is not one of them.

The message has been imprinted: a promise to return. Like a scarlet halo, it floats above her head, following her everywhere she goes.

**

A fucking camera.

She takes cover in one of the wooden mazes scattered throughout Mother’s Dwelling. She feels like a lab specimen under observation.

Someone’s plaything.

_Get a good look, did you, creep?_

She bends over a chest, digging through piles of junk and belongings: generator components, like rusty shells that melt at her touch. Rag dolls, little twig families, their heads replaced with bird skulls and feathers—things a feral child would craft. Or steal from victims. 

The artifacts crumble apart in her fingers. Acid-eaten flashlight batteries. Bones, some as long as her tibia. Wait, maybe that _was_ a tibia. Ugh.

She even finds a plastic, disposable camera, but quickly bats it aside. Her cheeks blush hot enough to sizzle the rain.

_I hope he did really take a picture, cuz it’s the last one he’s gonna get!_

She grins a madwoman’s grin. It’s too thin, too strained, but her relief is palpable. Almost...delirious.

Clutched in her hand is no bone, but a skeleton key. Her ticket out! She’ll be back at the survivor's camp, curled up with a half-drank bottle of wine under a sleeping bag before she knows it.

She glances around, as if on a shoplifting spree.

All this unpleasantness, this newfound unease of being stalked, watched, and something else, something upsetting that she can’t describe, finally behind her.

Back, to the roulette wheel of chainsaw-slinging brutes, swamp hags, and vengeful spirits. A paranormal circus of freaks and carnage, but one she at least knows and can predict its behavior.

Excuse her, though, if she isn’t overjoyed.

She’d been wrong about this prowling killer. The machinations and motivations of men, of killers who retain much of their humanity, remain a coffin she’d rather not crack open.

She goes to shut the chest.

 _I’m no FBI agent, after all. Or a lost explorer. Not much of anything, really. Just some chick_.

She stares into the chest, at the junk heap, how it smolders and glistens dimly in the torchlight. Spent potential, these pieces of people’s lives. Nothing but ashes and dust.

Some things can’t be understood. There is no name for them in the human language...except for one thing.

 **Evil**.

No sooner does she pocket her diamond in the rough, when a high-pitched scream breaks across the twilight.

Sigh.

She runs in their direction, keeping her eyes peeled for other options.

Just in case it all goes up in smoke.

**

She loses herself in chaotic spirals.

Someone is having a field day. There are footprints, trails of blood now, oh yes. Broken branches and snapped reeds. Spatter.

Dear God, where are the bodies?

She treads through a fairy ring of amanita virosa, severs their white stems and crushes their bell-shaped caps.

**Clunk!**

Dead center of the ring, she steps on something solid. A boulder?

She drops down, rapping the corrugated metal with her knuckles. Solid. A leftover bomb shelter? A door to Hades? Whatever it is, it has no business there in the middle of the Russian hinterland.

Wait.

_Oh my God; I'm home free._

She doesn’t feel relief this time, or even giddiness. Only the nagging, sinking sensation that she has forgotten something.

Her hand reaches into her pocket and grasps the key. Still there. She pulls it out.

While she’s good and distracted, that’s when she hears the heavy, excited breaths hissing from behind the wide fronds of a huge, prehistoric fern.

She goes light as a feather, stiff as a board.

Unfortunately for her, her tongue still works just fine.

“I hear you already, so just come out!” she yelps. “Or don’t, I couldn’t give less of a shit.”

The red devil obliges her and steps out of his hollow.

His costume is something a prankster might terrorize a neighborhood with. Except the Mischief Night effect is corrupted by the very real, very _sharp_ serrated knife, and by the sparkling jewels of blood that mix with the dew on his cape. 

He doesn’t scare her, per say, but he **_unsettles_** her. He makes her death-scars itch and throb, invisible under her pelt.

It doesn’t matter. She has the field advantage.

“A little late for Halloween, isn’t it?”’

She stomps the trapdoor with a hollow, ringing sound. Spins the key on her finger.

“No treats from me, which means no tricks for you. **_So_ sorry**.”

She swears he’s chuckling again, but it’s hard to hear over her rapid pulse. And at any rate, laughter isn’t a weapon, though it does get her heart going.

Because he _**does**_ chuckle, like he has just heard a splendid joke about her. One only he knows. Oh, she’s _really_ going to stick it to him for making her waste an entire trial and the Entity’s favor, running her in circles like a chihuahua tied to a post with a coyote on the loose.

“I’ve seen teenage boys make better costumes,” she berates. “Are those trash bags you’re wearing?”

Her insults fall on deaf ears. That damned camera's made its reappearance. He’s actually scrolling through it! The screen bathes his mask in ghostly light. God only knows what he’s looking at.

_Is this guy a killer or a tourist?_

Wait. She’s seen this image before, or something like it. Before selfies and smartphones, things she’ll never see again as a lost soul removed from the slipstream of time...

Not time. Decade. 

It strikes her: the mask. It’s different from the pictures in the articles, and his robes aren’t the same, but she’s sure. She feels it in her guts.

“You," she breathes.

No response.

“You’re the Ghostface, right? The one who killed all those people, back in the nineties?”

He tilts his head and the camera, raising it to get a better angle.

The air smells more metallic, somehow. It’s all that murder clinging to him. And is that cologne, or is she imagining it?

“I was just a kid,” she babbles on. “It was all over the news. The serial killer who stalked his victims, brutally stabbed them to death, and published it to the world. They said you were so proud of your work that you left evidence at the scene on purpose. So there was no mistaking it was YOU.”

She jabs a finger.

“Yeah, it's you all right. I remember your face. My parents had to put locks on my windows and I slept with the door cracked for years. Those stories, they gave me nightmares.”

She ends it with a shiver. Evidently, her nightmares follow her even into other worlds. Not tonight, though. Tonight she will win, escape this particular nightmare in her sleep.

She bends down and jams the key in the lock.

He's doing his best statue impression, no indication if he’s enjoyed her little introduction.

The hatch opens with a supernatural roar.

"What, no goodbye?" She laughs into the wind. “Fine. Later, loser!”

Before she can jump, something shiny arcs overhead.

She catches it on instinct, before she even realizes what it is: his camera.

“Wouldn’t want to leave-” the Ghostface mutters, much deeper, more richer than she’d imagined, a bottomless well.

The hatch calls to her, pulls on her clothes, begs her to leave.

She ignores it.

“-without seeing what happened to your friends, would you?”

She bristles.

“What makes you think they’re my friends?”

He shrugs.

 _It’s a trick!_ a little voice warns, but her thumb clicks the arrow button like it has a mind of its own. She scrolls through a series of photos, some meticulously shot, some blurred beyond recognition.

And she sees what she’s been missing the entire trial.

One by one, she witnesses a snapshot of each of her teammate’s deaths. Ending with poor Claudette, a waterfall of blood pouring from her mouth, shards of smeared broken glass embedded in her eyes.

She goes to throw the camera away in disgust. Before she can do it, she sees one last photo. She thumbs the zoom button and the pixels magnify.

It’s her, silhouetted against the moonlight in the spot where the leaves rained from the sky. There’s scant orange light from the smokehouse in the foreground, and a man’s long shadow stretches impossibly far, arrowing towards her.

The next photo is a few feet closer.

The next, she can clearly see the frays in her clothes, the split ends in her sodden hair, the leaves balanced on her hunched shoulders.

In the last one, right behind her, a gloved hand reaches, fingers splayed, as if to brush the leaves away, tousle her hair, or…

With a disgusted sound, she clicks one final time. It’s a side-portrait of her profile as she’s walking in the woods. He has skillfully captured her fear, the dismay that darkens and strains her eyes, the sorrowful pout of her lips.

Her stomach cinches, her skin prickles into goosebumps. He got close enough to touch her. More than once. It's likes she's looking into his reflection. A piece of his soul.

Now she's trapped inside, too.

A shadow falls, blackens out the circle of white angel caps, the yawning exit.

She barely notices.

_This was never a game. It was a stakeout. A gruesome photoshoot. **I never had any control.**_

She almost doesn’t feel his arm snake around her, pinning hers to her sides. He moves with the dark. He is the physical absence of light, there and not there, tenebrous yet solid.

Heat, on the nape of her neck.

He's pulled part of his mask back and his lips are hovering dangerously close, dampening her skin.

A misdirection. His hand slides hers off the key. His other aligns the knife, horizontal, against her throat. He forces her chin up with it, giving him better access to her neck. And sweeter parts as well.

 _No_.

He casually flips the hatch shut with his boot, never releasing his iron-like grip on her.

_Stop!_

She starts to quiver, and chokes down a sob with a shallow sound.

“What was that, about not giving a shit?” he laughs gruffly.

She's beside herself now. Astral projecting. Because, at the end of the day, pain never changes. Her nerves never dull, no matter how much she begs of the Entity for something, anything else...

“Go to hell,” she tells him.

At the invitation, he licks up, along her neck, then her jaw, ending with her salty tear on the tip of his tongue.

“ _Love_ to. But, ladies first.”

The shudder runs through her body. At the same time, he slips the knife expertly between her ribs, piercing her heart. More pressure than pain; she dies quickly without so much as a sigh.

A clean death that pleases the Entity more than it does him. Mercy isn't really his style.

The last thing she hears, as he lets her go and her knees crumple, is her own taunt thrown back at her:

**“Better luck next time."**

_Oh, there will be a next time, you fucker,_ she swears, as the darkness sweeps her under.

Until then, the camera slips from her fingers. It clatters loudly against the hatch and lands, screen side up, with her bloody thumbprint streaked across the screen.


	4. Crow's Laughter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _She would sooner see the entire thicket up in flames. The mere thought comforts her intensely. She exits, a few pieces of her left dangling on the nodding vines in her wake._
> 
> _Guess I’m part of his collection, now. Sick fuck._
> 
> _One of many sick fucks playing this otherworldly game. Why should she give a damn about some degenerate in a mask? There were others just like him. These maniacs were all the same: mindless killing machines._
> 
> _A second later, she forgets all about them._
> 
> _Evil has been to the woods._
> 
> _Just ahead, she glimpses low, scattered, sickly embers of their dying campfire._
> 
> _“Shit!”_
> 
> _She breaks into a run. ___

Elsewhere, in a different forest—this one full of scraggly young trees, not as overgrown and oppressive as Mother’s Dwelling—she dreams that a small, gray moth lights on her temple.

It flexes delicate, powdered wings, waggling its feathered antennae. She hears a whisper, like the murmurs of a disturbed mental patient.

_Wake up._

She comes to with a startled bleat, curled up like a fawn on the forest floor. Giggling, she draws a breath that’s pure bliss. Delightful and painless.

The moth circles in hectic zigzags, orbiting her head. She pauses to study it, her eyes two vacant windows.

A fiery bat shoots past and snatches out of the air, right in front of her, leaving nothing but a bright streak of flame.

Pieces of moth drift down, incinerated.

_Better luck next time._

His final, withering words come surging back up to haunt her.

**

She wakes—for real this time—screaming bloody murder.

Thrashing on the ground, she claps a hand over her heart. But there’s no arterial spray, no pain at all. She peels back her shirt, finds the skin baby-smooth and supple.

The Entity has brought her back. She will live to die another day.

_Hurrah._

She lies there, panting. Clothes soaked in sweat. She blinks back frustrated tears as the loss hits her in full.

 _He must have been salivating the entire time, waiting to rub my naivety in my face. And I just stood there and **let**_ _him._

She giggles shrilly and tosses handfuls of leaves in the air. Rolls over in a heap, makes a decay-angel.

“ _Lucky_ me.”

She laughs: great, gasping peals of absurdity til she’s crying. Black humor is one of the few things she has left, something the Entity can’t leech away.

Their camp will be nearby, too. Her one constant, a comfort she can count on no matter how horribly each trial goes. She can run like a teenager and go sulk in her tent.

Lick her wounds, the way he'd licked her neck.

_Home is where your heart is intact. Ha, ha._

She gets up and starts walking, a bit stiff-legged. Out-of-sync.

Her head begins to pound. It’s not unusual for something residual like this to happen, well, _after._ Nosebleeds and migraines are a common occurrence. Nothing a little Claudette concoction won’t cure.

_Claudette._

Something extra lingers, like a bad hangover, dissolving in her bloodstream. A red afterburn. Images hide in a neon bleed that she doesn't want to develop yet. One by one though, as she stumbles in the dark woods, morbid frames light up her memory like horrid little jack-o-lanterns: the tortured faces of her murdered teammates. Their twisted expressions of shock and disbelief, printed on the backs of her eyelids.

_Thought I was desensitized to this bullshit. This-_

Gore. Lacerations. Intestines, thrown freely about like party streamers.

A celebration, an orgy of violence.

_Guess not._

“Shit!”

She trips over a root and claws at a scrawny trunk for balance, tearing her nails in the process. She glowers, embarrassed, but only a few scattered crows have witnessed her debacle.

One of them caws and spreads its wings, hurrying away in a flurry of pinions. Its shadow slinks across her cheeks.

An animal, that man. A patient predator who gets off on watching people when their backs are turned, when they think they’re safe and alone. Letting it build and build. When he finally gets ahold of them to unleash all that pent-up _anticipation._

And to think she’d accused him of wearing trash bags.

_Oof._

She follows a trodden deer trail back to camp. The unblinking, watchful moon over her shoulder.

 _That was a rough one for all of us. Been a while since we were slaughtered so…e_ _xtravagantly._

_Quite the Midas touch that devil's got._

She rubs the space above her heart, her face cramping. Nothing like some post-trial reflections to prepare her for a camp full of traumatized, disappointed teammates. And yet, the thought of camp helps her move along.

She weaves her way through the bramble thicket that surrounds their site. Briars tug and tear at her clothes, unwilling to release her.

_That creep sure did us dirty. But that must be why the Entity picked him._

_He_ **_works_ ** _on people; doesn’t just hunt them or eat them. A real trickster with a camera._ _Have to admit, though, he has a good eye for lighting and angles._

Reeling, she struggles to extract herself from a particularly stubborn vine.

Getting more angry, more frustrated, but the more she fights it, the more she's trapped.

_Fucker probably takes his ‘keepsakes’ back to his lair, or wherever the Entity sends his lot to premeditate. Fantasize._

She grits her teeth and pulls.

 _It’s_ **sport** _for him._ _For all of them._

Too much take, and the branch gives, rebounds and belts her on the thigh. The scratch of thorns helps clear her head. 

She would sooner see the entire thicket up in flames. The mere thought comforts her intensely. She exits, a few pieces of her left dangling on the nodding vines in her wake.

_Guess I’m part of his collection, now. Sick fuck._

One of many sick fucks playing this otherworldly game. Why should she give a damn about some degenerate in a mask? There were others just like him. These maniacs were all the same: mindless killing machines.

A second later, she forgets all about them.

Evil has been to the woods.

Just ahead, she glimpses low, scattered, sickly embers of their dying campfire.

“Shit!”

She breaks into a run.

**

There should be flames leaping from the circle of stones they’ve collected. A column of defiant smoke rising in the sky. She should be seeing the prayer flags and decorations they’d strung up together during downtime: chains of beer cans, broken glass, and empty bottles, dried flowers and wreaths and feathers, painted sheets, wood carvings, and more.

Little traces of stubbornly-clinging life. Human remains.

None of those things are visible now. 

The space has been invaded.

**_Red, red, red._ **

A lightning bolt through her skull stops her in her tracks. She slams her eyes shut. The moonlight is too harsh, almost unbearable.

**_Can’t get you out of my head._ **

Finally she teeters like a drunkard into camp, stumbling over a flag pole that’s been split in half. Struck by lightning.

_Oh, dear God._

She takes a second to really drink it all in.

The Entity has decided to take its rage out on them, the losers.

A tornado may as well have run through the place. All the work they have put in to making this spot homey, almost livable, has been practically wiped away.

It’s happened before, but it hasn’t been this bad in a long while.

She would tell anyone, insist that this isn’t her fault. That she has _nothing_ to do with it...were it not for the adulterous feeling, worming its way in her heart. The hole’s been growing in size, ever since she woke up in Mother’s Dwelling to the sensation of being...

What, exactly? The right word does not come to her. 'Stalked' is the tip of a very obscure, man-shaped iceburg.

Now, she holds herself tightly while she tiptoes through shredded piles of their meager belongings, the rows of crippled tents.

She finds hers, little more than a sheet thrown across a stick frame, and _of course_ it’s undisturbed. One of the few still standing.

Just a coincidence. A lucky break.

She crawls inside, onto her sleeping bag. The familiar scents of herb bundles, strung from a line, the softness of the bedding under her fingers, do nothing to soothe her. 

Brokenly, she smiles. The bottle of red wine she keeps under her pillow is still safe and sound. _Thank God. Gonna need this for later._

The air inside tastes...funny. Stale. Probably just the Entity’s wrath.

It’s dark, in here. Much too cave-like. She quickly backs out and gets up. 

While she’s emerging from her tent, the moonlight fades. Storm clouds gather in the sky, obscuring celestial lights.

She lingers around the broken circle of great stones, which have been flung about like weeds, and prods the sorry, sullen embers with her boot. The bed of coals has survived, radiating heat waves and rendering the surrounding air aqueous, almost permeable.

Rustling, behind her. A twig snaps, and she jumps.

One by one, looking like hell, her three teammates emerge from the woods. 

Jake, David, and Claudette. Together, without her.

Wordlessly, they take in the destruction.

“Shit,” is all Jake can say, standing ankle-deep in the ruins of his tent.

“Agreed,” David mutters. “And what the hell’s all this glowing shit, all over our stuff?”

 _Entity goop,_ she thinks. _Orange h_ _aterade._

Claudette only sighs.

None of them make eye contact. They accept it, as they have to accept so much, though it nettles her to see how their shoulders sag.

Eventually they join her around the shambles of their fire, sitting on whatever they can find that isn’t busted. Or coated in alien, orange gunk.

A relief, to see Claudette’s glasses are no longer shattered, her irises intact. They drill little seeds, rooting holes into her soul through the swimming air. The botanist props her head up in one hand, fingers tangled into her dreadlocks.

 _Welcome to Survivor’s Anonymous,_ she thinks. _Who did ya, this time?_

No one wants to speak first. David and Jake are purposefully avoiding everyone, lost in thought.

Maybe just stunned.

“Well…” she drawls carefully, when she can’t take the silence. The defeat.

She picks up a twig, snaps it, and tosses it onto the bed of coals. A few teardrops of flame show up. Her soul, and something akin to anger, wells with them.

Fuck it; she ruins everything else, may as well break this, too.

“That fucking _sucked_ ," she says. No sense dressing it up.

“You can say that again,” David groans into his hands.

“He stabbed me twenty-six times,” Jake recalls, incredulous. “And that’s an estimate, because I lost count.”

“He tackled me and called me four-eyes,” Claudette bemoans. “Right before he jammed his knife in my eye sockets, laughed and said ‘now you’re no-eyes!’ Who _does_ that?”

 _Who indeed,_ she wonders. Her stomach does a flip, and she swallows.

“I know who,” she tells them. “He was an American.”

All three focus on her. She flushes, wishing she could shrink down and hide between the scattered firewood at her feet.

“Well, I sort of do. He goes by the name ‘Ghostface’, and he was...”

She tells them every single detail she can remember about him in the real world, based on the news stories and rumors. She tries to keep her muddled emotions out of it, but her voice is brittle and strained.

None of the others have heard about the masked American serial killer with a headlines fetish, though.

“And ultimately, who the fuck cares who he _really_ was?” David grunts, begrudging. He cracks his thick knuckles.

 _Is_ ,she corrects him silently. _He might be gone from the world, but he’s a presence in ours._

“We have bigger problems,” Jake observes. He motions to the turbulent skies, the wind shaking the trees.

“We need to build up this fire.”

They nod. A simple plan, but no one has the energy to make the first move.

Then, a flash of white-hot lightning flickers in the distance. A huge, slithering tongue that licks the horizon.

She jumps to her feet with them. As the thunder breaks, she massages the back of her neck. It stings badly, as if someone’s pinched it and tried to drag her by the scruff.

They start collecting any burnables they can find. The wind begins to moan forlornly in the twisting branches.

 _I looked for you all,_ she thinks, watching David scoop armfuls of kindling.

_I really tried._

She frowns deeply, wondering if the others can sense her guilt. Her anger.

 _Where_ **_were_ ** _you guys?_

But she’s lost her voice.

Jarred it, as she does so many things.

She looks up. The hazy moon hangs, a shade more somber in the night sky—another sign the Entity isn’t happy with them.

God forbid they live long enough to see it turn black.

Or crimson.

**

They stack the biggest bonfire they can, using anything they can find.

Once they have a roaring inferno going, they are slightly more at ease. The storm is about to break, but they will be able to weather it. She hopes.

If not, they at least have plenty of booze. 

“Whiskey’s here!” David crows, unearthing a crate from a pile of leaves.

"The kegs too! We're all gonna make it, after all.”

He breaks off a bottle and chugs thirstily. Claudette ogles him with mild disgust.

Crates of booze, unscathed. The Entity didn’t want to deprive them of mind-altering substances. In fact, it seems to encourage debauchery. Messy encounters.

Jake clears his throat and waits until all eyes are on him before speaking, in his quiet way.

“Once this weather passes, we’ll need to warn the others at the other encampments about the...um, the new guy.”

She winces. ‘New guys’ bring you coffee and doughnuts. Not stab wounds and selfies.

“They don’t know what they’re in for,” she insists. “What he’s capable of. Give me psychopaths with chainsaws and teleporting nurses all day. That creepy stalking thing he did, taking each of our pictures-”

“-stop it!” Claudette grimaces.

Something is bothering the young botanist. She turns to her and asks,

“How did he kill you, again? You were the last one, right? You never did say.”

_Maybe if you’d have stuck around to help instead of treating me like a fucking bad luck charm, you’d know how._

She nods to Claudette, but chokes back an answer. She draws a shallow breath, still rubbing her neck.

“He tricked me into looking at the photos he took of you all, when he...well, you know. I was _literally_ standing on the open hatch. He crept up on me. It was obvious he’d been saving me for last. I kinda deserved it. I had taunted him. I thought he was bad.”

“ _Bad_? He made a bloody picnic of us, didn’t he?” David laughs brusquely. It amazes her how well he can brush these things off.

“Well, that’ll teach you for next time, won’t it? Less flirtin’ with the guy with the knife, and more jumpin’ into the hole at your feet.”

He tosses her the whiskey, and she tips it back, remembering how the camera had arched in slow-motion when the Ghostface had thrown it. At the mere notion of flirting with such a brute, she turns red in the face. Places her hand on the back of her aching neck.

“Want me to look at that?”

Claudette approaches, and gently tugs the collar of her shirt. She gasps and draws back like she’s seen signs of the plague (which, during certain trials, they all have).

“What is it!? A spider?” 

“Y-you’ve got um, uh,” Claudette stammers, pointing. “Guys?”

The others gather round to gander at her. She blushes, to be under such sudden scrutiny.

“What is it?! Don’t just stand there!” she bawls.

David trounces over and pulls back her collar, a bit rougher than Claudette. 

On the nape of her neck is a raw, purple bite mark, a ghastly ring surrounded by a bruise.

“Aw shit. He’s left a full set of dental impressions,” he says blithely.

“What?!” she whines.

Claudette adds, “Looks like he wanted to drive a point home.”

Though the tone in her voice suggests otherwise.

“You must have really pissed him off,” Jake concludes.

She fixes her shirt and storms off.

“Yeah, well. Can’t blame a girl for trying. Which is apparently more than _you all_ did."

They drop the matter, pitying her. She refuses to let Claudette put salve on the bite, despite the girl’s warnings about infection (if the Entity wants her to die of sepsis; so be it) and decides not to tell them about their little embrace, nor the ‘love lick’ the Ghostface had so maliciously teased her with.

Apparently, more than a lick. 

_Yikes. Don’t even remember that one._

_It’s over. I’m alive; we’re safe._

_Until next time._

She remembers the vow she took as she died, and sighs. If she had a dime for every time she swore revenge, swore to escape this place, these freaks inhabiting it.

_Don’t believe I want to think about it anymore._

So she doesn’t.

As the rain starts to come down, she crawls into her tent, chugs deeply from the wine bottle until there’s nothing left to chug, and passes into a fitful blackout.

_**_

Lightning flashes. Rain drives against her flimsy tent, droplets launching airborne raids against her forehead.

Overall, a wonderful evening.

She cannot sleep for long in this racket. Her heart is galloping; her head swims like a bowl of fish.

As she rolls onto her back, she spies something wriggly on the ceiling. Not leaves or debris, x-rayed by the storm. Something serpentine that only the lightning illuminates, which was not there before.

Fumbling for matches, she sits up. Drags one across the strip.

 _Ssskkrrrt._ _Pop! Fssss._

Match glow fills the tent.

She looks up, in her little bubble of fire, to see a scarlet message painted in wine or blood. Written in cramped, meticulous letters. Whoever did it must have done so on their back, lying _exactly_ where she is, now.

 **YOU TASTE** **_DELIGHTFUL._**

 **Let’s do it again,** **_real_ ** **soon** . **< 3**

**-GF**

  
**  
  


She crawls out of her corrupted tent, into the wind and rain.

Possessed by a fury she never knew was within her.

The storm wraps her in chaos. The others are hunkered down in their own hovels. She locates the fire, still smoking robustly beneath a shield of logs, and kneels before it.

Hesitates. If she does this, if it really works, she could be unleashing a brand of hell on herself and the others, such as the likes they've never known.

But that sure beats cowering like a loser in her tent.

Besides, she's been invited. It would be rude to refuse him, now.

Lightning flashes; thunder rumbles.

She makes her decision.

The splinter from Mother's Dwelling is still lodged under her nail. She rips it out and squeezes three drops of her blood onto the sizzling embers.

Bowing her rain-soaked head, she prays.

Nothing happens. At first.

Then the fog encircles her, almost eagerly so.

It carries her out of the forest and drops her, straight down, into the blinding snow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, uh, idk if people are really diggin this weird fic or not, but I'm having a heck of a time writing it. >:3 
> 
> About to kick this slow burn up a notch, methinks. I have tortured myself (almost) long enough. <3


	5. From Below, Sent Above

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The knife comes out of nowhere, pressed near the corner of her eye. An insurance policy to ensure best behavior. Maybe a little of the worst, too._
> 
> _She whimpers, in vain, for pity._
> 
> _“Oh, save those sounds for me, won’t you?” he begs, with another dizzying reveal of his canines._
> 
> _“Kill me!” she screams, one final time._
> 
> _He shakes his head._
> 
> _“No.”_
> 
> _“Do it,” she says, “or your shit GOD will punish you!”_
> 
> _“Think I give a damn what HE wants?_
> 
> _Fuck the Entity. I’ve got you on my time, now.”_
> 
> _He comes down again and sinks his teeth into her neck._
> 
> _Then, oh then, she really starts thrashing._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: smut ahead! Way ahead...hopefully this chapter's a good read, though, and no one will notice? e_e

He has her pinned in the dirt.

Their combined thrashing creates a ring of slush and mud. Together they’re steadily making their own _Cocytus_. A private little circle of hell, all for their own.

And of course he’s trying to butcher her in that fucking devil mask.

Perfect.

**

_She stands amid the snowdrifts, stunned. She can’t believe her parlor trick, her parley with the Entity, has worked._

_Then again, yes, she can._

_It has granted her wish, spiriting her off in a blanket of fog and distortion, dropping her on the rugged peak of a mountain. For a confounding moment all she can see are swirling, chaotic clouds.  
_

_A_ _miniature human, trapped in a snow globe and shaken upside-down._

_Then, the preternatural curtains peel back, and she’s struck by a lofty, nosebleed-inducing view that makes her feel as tiny, temporary, and insignificant as a single snowflake in this blizzard._

_All the better for her to hide by._

_Up the only path ahead, a broken down ski resort sits trapped in quiet ruin. ‘Mt. Ormond Resort’, the faded sign reads. Legion territory._

_Best keep her eyes peeled, before someone does it for her._

_She starts the arduous plod through knee-deep snow, already glancing over her shoulder. She has to be sure it’s_ ** _his_** _trial. Don’t want to give any other killers the wrong impression (or a free sacrifice)._

_No, this is personal._

_And the quickest way to determine if it’s him, is to find some bait. Other survivors._

_Like clockwork, she finds three people already working on the generator inside the abandoned chalet. She peers at them from between the slats of a boarded-up window, fighting the urge to rush in, offer help._

_It feels so_ **_wrong_** _, there on the other side of the wall. Watching._

_It’s worse because she recognizes them: Ace, Feng Min, and Kate. They and a few others, including the intrepid Ash, occupy a much nicer camping area back home. A real winner’s circle, with a plethora of resources and badassery at their disposal._

_And they didn’t make it there on dumb luck alone._

_“Someone’s watching us,” she hears Feng whisper to Ace._

_She shifts nervously, because she thinks Feng means her. But then, she follows Feng’s tense line of sight, out the destroyed wall, past the snowcat some possessed idiot crashed into it, towards the darkened lift shack._

_Bingo._

_At the sight of that creep’s shadow, leaning out, being way too obvious, she doesn’t feel like a winner. More like prey. But prey that hasn’t been spotted is another species entirely._

_Before either party can spot her, she slips off into the blizzard. She will have to stay cloaked, rely on all the blinding white, if she’s to succeed. Shouldn’t be too hard._

_With the cold and color draining from her face, she’s already white as a ghost._

_Or a moth._

_**_

She’s almost ashamed, how quickly he catches and dismantles her.

Hard to escape that sixth sense of his, an infrared radar hopelessly attuned to her heartbeat, picking up every panicked step, like little slivers of meat to a wolf.

Now that wolf has her by the throat, slamming her flat on her back. She flips against the hard permafrost with a soundless gasp, his elbow crushing her ribs. He deals out just enough force to inflict his point—he’s _boiling_ angry—but not break her. Not yet.

He moves with astounding ferocity for someone so slight, so lithe.

This instant snap into viciousness, the iron-maiden vice of his limbs should not surprise her, shake her, the way they do.

But once he’d realized the match wasn’t going _his way_ , even someone as methodical, as patient, as _intimate_ as the Ghostface is bound to lash out at the person responsible.

In other words, her.

“Go on, _fight,_ ” he grunts, dodging a swift jab from her fingers. Not really sure what she’s trying to do, given his face is protected by the mask.

Silly little thing.

“I like it _more_ when you struggle.”

She tries to writhe her way out, but he crunches a kneecap into her abdomen, and she flattens. Temporarily subdued.

“Bastard,” she hisses.

He stiffens and heaves a breathy sigh: _yessss._

In response, she shows her bloody teeth up at him, grinning. One last defiance.

“Yeah, I get it,” he purrs heatedly.

Or rather, the _plastic_ purrs. She fixates on it with pure hatred. _Stupid fucking thing. If I get the chance, I’m gonna rip it right off and give the devil his due._

“Proud of yourself, aren’t you?” he continues.

Reaches down beneath his spiked cloak.

“Got, something, for me?” she strangles out. To hell with fear and humility; she’s beyond them. Giddy with revenge and if she’s not quite mistaken, a touch of mania.

“ _Just_ the thing,” he promises.

Long and metal and thirsting, he pulls out the blade from the drop-sheath on his thigh, and terror leaps into her eyes, makes the irises sparkle and glisten like glaciers under broad daylight.

“Think you could outsmart me? Deprive me of my _fun_? Well I hope you enjoyed your winning streak while it _lasted_.”

Before she can snarl her riposte, he presses the knife fast against her throat, cutting off her voice, her air supply. It astounds her how much _pressure_ it has, without breaking the skin.

She knows better than to assume this is the end. At the nip of unforgiving steel, she shuts her eyes anyway. Habits.

“Don’t go falling asleep, now,” he growls, and twists her hair in his free hand. Thrusts her head back to bare her tender throat to him in full, slamming her featherweight chest snug against his sturdy, heaving one.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” she groans.

He smirks and caresses her jaw with his implement, all sorts of murky ideas running through his head, of what to do with this interfering woman, this _imp_ tampering with the good thing he has going with the Big Arachnid Boss.

The curved metal’s warmed by the heat of his hand, for once not by the body cavities of his victims. 

What a party tonight’s turned out to be. A real massacre. For him. The Entity won’t be too pleased three of his _precious_ survivors escaped.

All thanks to her.

She _severely_ clings to the hope this is worth it. That somewhere, those three—Ace, Feng, and Kate—are toasting her memory.

Very soon, depending on her captor’s increasingly violent mood swings, a memory is all she may ever be.

“When I am done with you, oh you,” he vows,

“You’re gonna go to a place where not even _God_ can resurrect you.”

**

_She works and works and works, sabotaging those swinging, frosted hooks until her fingers are numb and blistered._

_“All play and no gore make the Entity very bored,” she sings into the howling wind._

_He won’t be able to pay his precious, bloody tithe with nowhere to hang fresh meat!_

_“Fuck you very much,” she concludes, and wipes her unfeeling hands on her ice-crusted jeans. She sets a well-used toolbox down and kicks it over._

_Pop! Pop! Pop! Generators one and two and three all go off without a hitch. Unless her ears deceive her, the night is already rapidly falling to pieces for him._

_Her grin spreads, a cracked, slanted thing as wide as Susie’s mask._

_This lonely, quiet mountain will be lighting up, singing sunnier tunes before she knows it. For once things are going her way. Thank the Entity. Thank fate. Bill._

_Whoever’s responsible, she owes them, big time._

_**_

“Finally,” he growls. “ **All** **mine**.”

His words muffled by polymer and cold static, that stretched-agape mouth she finds so loathsome.

“I should have known. Sleeping beauty, back from the dead. Me splitting your heart open once wasn’t enough, hmm? You just _had_ to come back for _more?_ Well, that’s fine by me.”

He throws his hooded head back and chortles gruffly. 

“You should know, though. People will say you’re obsessed!”

 _He sure does love to jabber_ , _doesn’t he?_ A real Pulitzer candidate for the nuthouse category.

“Go fuck yourself,” she suggests blithely.

He slams her again into the ground, til she can feel her soul leaking out of her body to escape. Maybe that’s just spinal fluid. Her ribs are a few cracks shy of stained glass.

“Just kill me already! I _know_ you want to!”

The sooner she gets it over with, the sooner she can return with a good yarn for the others.

“Huh?” He feigns surprise, shrugging his broad shoulders, and she focuses a little _too_ long on the creaking, leather-scented hold of his arms, his hips grinding so _hatefully_ against hers.

“What _I_ want? You sure it’s not about what **_you_** want? Mmmm, I bet you’d like that. A quick, painless exit, like last time,” he croaks in her ear, 

“how _uninspired_.”

She freezes. She knows he isn’t going to go easy on her. Still, his cruelty never ceases to exceed her wildest imaginings.

He chuckles, low, from deep within his belly, flush against hers, and she feels the blade trace along her jaw. He uses just. Enough. Restraint.

And coos,

“Now, now. Don’t go passing out before I can prick anything. If anyone’s earned a little dismemberment tonight, it’s you.”

She’s inclined, compelled not to disagree, though her screaming, railing muscles against his tremble and quake with protest.

He is an undercurrent made flesh, and she’s drowning beneath him.

**

_From a crouch behind a snow pile, she watches the Ghostface prowl up the crest a slope. The elements tear at his shroud, the snowfall a blinding deluge, but he shows no sign of tiring._

_He’s gone up for a better view. Must be having trouble seeing, with all these lights bursting on._

_She smiles knowingly at his misfortune. Ah, how the tables are slowly turning. She can’t help but feel she and some evil force are working in tandem on this one. For once, it isn’t her that’s got a target on her back, and the schadenfreude she feels is...intoxicating._

_Though it does feel odd, stalking a stalker._

_He finally finds the broken hook and looks sufficiently rigid (annoyed). With a grunt he bends down and hoists it back into place, wasting valuable time and energy. Backbreaking work, that of a killer._

_But she has to admit, he has one hell of a tight body on him. She shakes her head._ Yikes, did I just think that? _It’s enough to make one want to sin._

_Smiling to herself, she doubts the Entity shares her sentiments, although it does seem to honor her newfound lust for atrocity. She wonders what fresh torments will befall Poor Poltergeist Boy, when he produces nothing for his god._

_No screams. No kills. Nothing._

_He bows his horned head, as if contemplating that exact thing. He ignores the swirling snowdrifts and ice phantoms dancing all around him, the spy with her thumb in her mouth, sucking on her splinter wound._

_If she didn’t know any better, she’d say he looks almost...lonely. Dejected._

_“Eeeeek!” Feng Min screeches, from somewhere nearby._

_A locker door slams abruptly._

_The Ghostface’s head shoots up. He practically_ **_leaps_ ** _down the hill toward the sound of suffering._

_She goes to follow him, when she hears a musical crackling from the other side of the snow pile. Even over the wind’s howl, she’d recognize that sound anywhere, like the quiet lull of insects on a midsummer night._

_She’s found his lit totem. A pile of bones and a tempting little stack of flames. It pulsates with light, as if to its very own heartbeat._

_Her eyes go as wide as saucers. Mesmerizing, how it shines ethereally, even in the storm. She almost doesn’t want to destroy it._

_But she_ **_definitely_ ** _wants to get her hands on all that fire._

_**_

“You should know, I’m a man of different hands-on methods. I do get so _bored,_ sometimes.

It’s nice to have a _challenge_ like you.”

This won’t last. He’s shaking badly now, with this desire to cut her. Peel her open. Chip and flay at her bones. He’s going to _fucking snap_ and take his murderous rage out on her body, soon enough. Crack her into the earth until her marrow won’t be found til the spring thaw.

It doesn’t matter. She relaxes. _Submits._ She won’t let him eat her fear. She’s been through worse, and she’s had her satisfaction, ruining his little game.

Even if the price she pays is **dear**.

“You _really_ ran me in circles tonight,” he admits, almost affectionate. “Like a clever. Little. Fox.”

An accurate comparison, considering she’s about to be skinned alive.

He taps her, in different places, with the knife—nose, chin, throat, down and around the mounds of her breasts, stopping at the tops of each—as if he can’t decide what piece of her he wants to play with first.

Or _how_ he wants to play.

He says, “Took me a while to figure out what was going on. After the last time, I never thought I’d see that sweet, ignorant face of yours again.

At least I have my mementos to serve me well.”

 _The photos,_ a distant part of her thinks. _Glad I could make it into his little black scrapbook. Although, do I really wanna know what ‘serve him well’ means?_

“Just do me a favor and don’t pen my obituary,” she sighs.

“Mmm. You put the ‘bitch’ in that word; I’ll give you that.”

An icicle tip comes to rest by her temple. That knife is fucking freezing, a scalpel straight out of an Antarctic morgue, from merely a few seconds in the open air.

She protests with a weak, mousy squeak that causes a deep, physical reaction in him. He tightens, coils all around her like a python. Actually hisses, too.

_Christ, what a freak._

“Do it again. Make that **_wonderful_** _**sound**_ ,” he pleads and goads, stroking the side of her face with an impossibly soft glove.

When she won’t obey, he grabs her chin cruelly, enough to leave bruises.

“Let me know you’re still alive, so I can _tear_ all of it out of you _.”_

He’s a sun gone supernova, a falling star crashing into a furnace. One that burns with a rage she incited…

...and he just told her he _wasn’t_ _expecting_ _her_?

The sudden confusion blows away her resolve like dust. 

“You,” she gasps, “you didn’t call me here?"

**

_He’s finally spilled some blood._

_She can hear a series of thuds and crashes, followed by a high-pitched scream that can only be Feng Min crying out in agony._

Need to hurry, hurry, hurry, _she thinks._

_The flames lick and caress her fingers, but they do not singe her. With a snap, she finishes disassembling the hex, and the little death shrine collapses; the candles gutter out, and it becomes just another useless pile of ash and bones._

_A crack of thunder ripples across the resort, rattling the ski lift cables, the rusty chairs. Anyone within ten miles would hear that dirge._

_The Entity is not pleased someone is messing with its magic._

_“You brought me here,” she speaks into the storm. Into a void of churning nothingness._

_Except there is something that hovers there, listening. A shadow._

_“Now give me what I asked for.”_

_**_

He didn’t write the fucking message.

The ground caves asunder, and she drifts a thousand miles away. She’s all raw energy, swarming in the skies, at the mercy of the furies within this man.

He cocks his head in that arrogant manner she detests.

The knife is back against her jugular, and she’s a solid woman again. Flesh and blood and hypersensitive neurons. She can barely breathe beneath him. He grabs her by the throat with his free hand, _squeezes_ , and now all she can do is pray for air like a drowning priestess.

“What are you talking about?” he asks.

She goes stiff as marble.

“You wrote...a message…” she chokes out, “in my tent!”

“Oh?” 

He sits back, straddling her with those strong legs of his. His black jeans are chafing her thighs raw. He won’t, _can’t_ let up on the knife. He has a stranglehold on it, almost as strong as the one he has on her windpipe.

“Did I?” he simpers.

“I don’t recall doing such a thing. Must be a _mistake._

He cuts her, and she wails.

**

_It’s not hard to find Feng and the killer. All she has to do is follow her long, pained moans, like a sadistic siren song._

_She catches up with them outside of the chalet. Just in time to see him standing over the fallen girl. Feng’s on her flank in a pool of red snow. Blood jets from her gaping mouth._

_She can tell by the way the Ghostface looms over her that he’s enjoying this intensely._

_The knife winks at her in the moonlight. He raises it and cleans it off with a neat swipe of his glove. A wonder he doesn’t fucking filet himself._

_He hoists a limp Feng onto his shoulder and heads for the nearest hook, moving at an agitated, hasty clip. Work to be done, souls to sacrifice._

_Feng comes to, starts wiggling and screaming as he arrives at the wooden post._

_But the hook lies useless on the ground, covered in snow._

_“Uh oh!” she cups her hands to her mouth, shouting._

_“Whatcha gonna do now, moron?”_

_He drops Feng and whirls around._

_Oh, she knows_ **_exactly_ ** _what he’ll do._

_She’s counting on it._

_She leads him away from Feng, in a blinding chase through the blizzard. Her legs arc; she’s leaping like a strange breed of snow gazelle. She leads him back the way they came, towards a maze of destroyed walls._

_He is all-too-happy to hunt her down, his bloodlust driving him forward at startling speeds._

_She gets to a window and hoists herself up, over, vaulting to the other side, just as his knife comes stabbing after. It shrieks and sparks as it collides with frozen granite, instead of her soft flesh. He doesn’t say a word to her the entire time, but she can_ **_feel_ ** _his hatred drilling holes in the back of her head._

_Spinning, she catches a glimpse of him in the window. In the absence of light, he is utterly demonic. Tenebrous._

_There and not there, a non-present presence, like an apparition. Or a trick photo._

_**_

He carves her flesh like a pumpkin.

A little half-moon nick, on her temple. A kitten scratch. It stings like bitter defeat; makes her eyes water.

“Poor baby,” he mocks. “You’re five seconds from losing your goddamn mind, aren’t you?”

Far from it, unfortunately. The urge to live, to escape, hits in full force. Not even the almighty cold or he can restrain it. Oh, what a wicked mistake she’s made! What a hopeless idiot she is! Subjecting herself to this, and he isn’t even aware **_why_** …

She looks up, and a shudder wracks her entire body. He is studying her, savoring her newfound terror, the ‘ _whoops, I fucked up now'_ widening of her eyes. Her lips, puckered into a little ‘o’, captivate him.

“You **_asked_ ** to be sent to **little old** **_me_**?” he breathes. “After our date in the woods?”

_Date!?_

“Yes.”

Instead of rejecting her spell, he laughs, inhales it, embraces it. The joy, oh the _jolliness_ in that laugh will be the soundtrack to her night terrors for good, long while. Maybe an eternity.

“Well, sweet thing, I don’t know how or why your wish was granted,” he confesses.

He flips the knife and expertly aligns the tip with her heart, with a flamboyant style a magician might envy.

She claws at his arms, scrapes leather under her nails.

“But damn, am I **_GLAD_** _!_ ” he bellows.

“Likewise!” she screams.

She lashes out in her rage, just as he’s about to stab down with a flex of his forearms. If she must die, suffer a hundred puncture wounds at the hands of this maniac, she’s _damn well_ gonna take a piece of him with her.

A piece of his identity, that is.

Because that _stupid_ mask is now dangling in her right hand. She’s stripped away his gimmick, and she’s taking the real Ghostface’s **_face_ ** with her, straight to the grave.

**

_She loses him in the maze, and her distraction works._

_Pop! goes another generator. The others will have found and healed Feng, and by the sound of it, they’re working double-time to get the fuck out of dodge._

_She smiles, exiting the jungle area. Ghostface has flown straight towards the source of the noise. Predictable killer behavior._

_He’s desperate._

_She heads for the white-capped hill. At its crest, by the defunct hook, she leans against the post and watches the three survivors unite round the hatch._

_Ace, of course, has found a skeleton key. The only reason they haven’t left yet: her. They don’t want to leave their fourth person behind...whoever they are._

_They’re crouched around the trapdoor, looking unsure. Itching to jump._

_“We can’t just leave-” she hears Kate say._

_Ace nods fervently. “Oh, trust me, yes we ca-”_

_“HEEEEY!” She cries, jubilant, waving to them from the top of the hill._

_“What are you guys waiting for? Let’s get the hell outta here!”_

_They turn towards her voice. Kate leaps to her feet, screams, and points at her._

_At something **behind** her. _

_But that’s all she remembers, before a tectonic force collides with her, flinging her off the hill like a cast-aside ragdoll. The snow drifts save her life, spare her any serious injury, other than a concussion._

_When she comes to, she’s alone. Her cheek numb from being pressed into the cold._

_She crawls to where the other three were. The hatch is shut tight. Locked._

_“FUCK!”_

_She panics._

_Trapped. Abandoned, in this world, with a blood-starved, deranged killer._

Why do I have the worst fucking luck in the world?

_There’s no time to mope._

_She rolls over, faces the chalet. He storms through the open door. Sees her, collapsed on top of the hatch, stranded._

_Only one left alive._

_He shrugs, stepping towards her, his lolling mask a glowering mockery of her fears._

_Better one left than none. He’s always been a duo kinda guy, anyway._

_**_

There’s just one problem with what she’s done.

The face now staring down at her, so close his hot breath caresses her cheekbones, is attractive. Devilishly so.

She’d been expecting nothing short of a cenobite under there. Instead, she got a seething angel.

He’s young, maybe early thirties at best, and his thick, brown hair is a matted mess, plastered against his forehead, and though his pale cheeks are flushed and ruddy with wrath, his eyes are impossibly hard flecks of black ice. Slippery, hazardous, sable’s eyes, those of a clever beast that never gives up on its prey, til its dragging it screaming by the throat to its hole in the cemetery and a featured spot on the front page.

There are some lines, too. A scowl mark that starts at his right cheekbone, ending at the corner of his mouth. A deep furrow creases his brow. Ears that stick out just a tad, the tips rosy pink. Drops of sweat freeze to his temples, his knit eyebrows and lashes frosted over. All this suddenly fascinates her. All these stormy emotions and patterns going on, and she’s caught **dead** **center**.

“Ha ha!” she crows, and tosses his mask back in his face.

He draws back in mild surprise. No missed reactions, there. Perhaps he was expecting even _this._

She doesn’t care.

“I GOT you!” she laughs in her desperation. Not even _thinking_ about all the pain and torture in her future.

It’s over. Bone-dry print, this little revenge story.

Then:

“No.” He seizes her wrists behind her head, the knife caught between them. 

“I’ve got _YOU_.”

In place of a killing blow, he lowers his head down and locks his lips with hers, _hard._ Capturing her mouth. He jams his tongue inside to taste her surprise, swallowing her startled squeak.

It lasts forever, that invasive kiss. It wrecks her, dashes her against the snowbanks, her battered body screaming for _more_ , dose after dose of dopamine...

He pulls away only to draw a quick breath. A thin line of saliva connects them, freezes in the wind. He wipes frost delicately from her split lower lip, where he’s bitten it.

He runs his tongue with her blood across his teeth, returning the smile she gave him a seduction ago.

“You taste _delightful,"_ he admits...for the first time.

Her confusion soars to Everest heights.

The knife comes out of nowhere, pressed near the corner of her eye. An insurance policy to ensure best behavior. Maybe a little of the worst, too.

She whimpers, in vain, for pity.

“Oh, save those sounds for me, won’t you?” he begs, with another dizzying reveal of his canines.

“Kill me!” she screams, one final time.

He shakes his head.

“No.”

“Do it,” she says, “or your shit _GOD_ will punish you!”

“Think I give a damn what HE wants? 

_Fuck_ the Entity. I’ve got you on _my_ time, now.”

He comes down again and sinks his teeth into her neck.

Then, oh then, she really starts thrashing.

**

He hoists her up, up, onto his shoulder, even when she’s struggling, spitting like a wild animal, and starts carrying her towards the chalet.

The busted-out windows glow with sinister, fiery light. He’s carrying her into that hell house, that hotel of horrors.

“Go on! Take me to the basement, you fucker! See if I care! _See_!” she snarls.

He makes a low sound of approval, his arm cinching around her waist, wresting the breath from her lungs. She finds the air reserves to scream, anyway. She knows, feels it, in her deepest places: there is a hole in the earth, full of sharp things not even the fickle Entity will allow her filthy human hands to touch. Tamper with.

From her upside-down world, she watches wisps of leather trail and flutter in the cold wind behind him.

She had thought, for a moment, when he was kissing her...but no. He’s determined to have her blood.

He crosses through the threshold with her on his back. The heat of the fire hits her in a dizzying wave. She feels nauseated, butterflies swarming in her esophagus.

He starts heading for the basement, and she stops struggling. Just lays there, head hanging. Listening to the casual _thud, thud, thud_ of his laced boots.

She’s dead weight.

He stops, and it damn near stops her heart. He considers something.

Then, with the same callous, unceremonious attitude, he drops her on the orange couch cushions, next to the fire pit.

She lets out a startled, confused squeak. They are miles and miles away from that dreaded stairwell. Now she realizes she is miles away from anything. He was right, earlier. She’s losing her mind.

So she lays there, panting. Tries to crawl away. His black boots are coming at her. They leave shining, tarry footprints.

He descends on her without warning, drops down onto the small of her back, pinning her to the couch.

Before she knows what’s even happening, he’s pushing her down by the shoulders, kissing the back of her neck, tousling the frozen locks of her hair, brushing them out of her face. Smelling her flushed skin, licking it like a starved beast. Her body responds immediately to the drastic shift in mood, rising against him, stoking a hunger that’s been growing inside her ever since he kissed her outside.

That already feels like an eternity ago, and they’re _more than_ eager, downright insane to make up for lost time.

He bites the back of her neck, hard, and leaves more swollen impressions. She moans at the dig of his teeth, her fingers clawing into the cushions. All the ice melting off their bodies forms a chimeric human-shaped puddle.

“You like it like this?” he asks, breathy, yanking on her hair so hard she sees stars. Impatient, but he _needs_ to hear her admit it.

“Rough? Tell me now, or forever hold your peace.”

“Yes,” she moans. “ _Yes._ ”

“Good. _Good girl_ ,” he purrs, beyond pleased.

Without another word spoken between them, he takes her, right there, on the floor. But what happens in silence, speaks forbidden volumes.

He’s so greedy for her, and she for him, he doesn’t even bother undressing himself. He immediately works at her pants, her underwear, yanking them down around her knees. She’s bent and prostrated under him, and as she leans back she presses her ass and thighs against his grinding hips. She can feel the _strain_ of him, hear him unbuckle his belt, the zipper glide as he takes himself by his hand, pulling his throbbing-hard cock into the heated air.

He slots himself inside her, easily. Too easy. She arches her hips, helps tunnel and glide him along her walls with a muffled, wet sound, til he’s snug inside and she’s clamping down _tight._

A few short, precise strokes to get the rhythm right, and he starts carving her out. With each slam, each complete and total _filling_ , she cries. Wails. His wildly gyrating hips slam her buttocks in a very loud, very indignant manner that has her moaning and cat-crying with each thrust.

He finishes in her like that, with his hands on her hips, pushing himself impossibly farther into her, ramming against that poor, soft wall of her cervix, and she comes with a strangled cry and final, _delicious_ dip of her spine, welcoming every drop of his seed inside her. A quick and messy union. 

Panting lightly, he strokes along her thighs, the swells of her buttocks, as he pulls out. Slow, so as not to spill anything, but a bunch leaks onto the stained cushions, anyway.

His gloves are still on. Very little of their skin has touched, and she finds herself instantly craving, _needing_ more.

The feeling is more than mutual, if the way he’s looking down on her now indicates.

Oh, they have become fast addicts to one another.

A proper execution. A rapid descent, like a forming tornado.

The start of a beautifully _twisted_ fascination.

**

Not long afterwards, right after they clumsily pull their wet pants back on, all hell literally breaks loose. 

The Entity has tired of their little foray. Their sacrilege.

Some might even say it’s _PISSED._

He hurries, carrying her across fault lines that break into fractals and gush plumes of lava. Runs with her through great geysers of steam as the earth splits open.

His boot crashes down on the hatch, and it pops open and begins to whir.

“Wait!” she clings to him, hovering over that yawning precipice.

“Wait!”

“Don’t worry,” he says.

He lets go, drops her, with a stomach-lurching plunge, into darkness.

She can barely hear him over the roar of everything collapsing.

“I’ll see you again.

 **_I love you._** ”

And with that, the lid slams shut, and she falls, spinning, into oblivion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, Danny boy. So like you to 'fall' for the first survivor chick to wind up in your lap!


	6. What's in a Name?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _She knows she shouldn’t be doing this, but it feels so good not to think, not to over-analyze, to connive and scheme. She focuses on how he felt inside her at his deepest. Her hand slips down past the rim of her jeans, the other slides under her open collar and works at her breast, teases a nipple until its stiff and tenting her shirt._
> 
> _The usual Rolodex of random fantasies, porn clips, things she used to watch as a normal stressed woman with a 9-5 job and bills and ordinary problems, don’t even make guest appearances. He takes center stage, this masculine devil in black and red, a mix of an underfed Ron Livingston, all dark eyes and messy hair and Cillian Murphy’s sultriest voice, whose name she doesn’t even know, whose lips she’s only kissed once._
> 
> _The kind of guy you would pass over at the office and never notice how his eyes ravish, devour, possess your image, when you walk away. ___

And I shall seek you endlessly, for  
I am a moth, and you’re my flame

Knowing that I’ll burn at your touch  
I return, for you’re a fire; untamed

-Zubair Ahsan

**

“Wake up!”

Someone shaking her. Startled voices. A cacophonous chorus of summer insects, perturbed by the thunder of a slowly approaching storm. On top of that ruckus, a sudden, jarring sort of noise: moths, some as small as a pin, some with thoraxes as large as her thumb, flinging their paper-soft bodies against the box.

Each death-zap comes zigzagging in from her cracked window. The wind follows, too, flaring out the curtains of her childhood bedroom. As if the hot, oppressive atmosphere is drawing, exhaling one big collective breath.

“Hello? Hello!”

 _Zap! Zzzap!_ In another life, she counts every electronic blast from her bed as they perish to the steadily growing peals of thunder.

“David, do something...”

Meanwhile the crickets keep on singing, like nothing’s happening, like hundreds of their little friends aren’t lying in a twitching, sizzling mass grave of dust and fried guts, which she will have to sweep off the porch with tomorrow’s chores before their damn chocolate lab, Rufus, can eat it and it makes her _nauseated_ which is really very _bad_ because every time she gets a _bad feeling_ terrible things like storms happen-

“Get her up! C’mon.”

“Slap her, if you gotta.”

“Sorry about this, lass.”

She recognizes that accent, that bark: David. She doesn’t fancy getting a backhand from him.

“Wait!” she squeals. The same word she screamed to the Ghostface (oh, how she _detests_ that she doesn’t even know his name, nor he hers, and there’s _so_ much in a name) before he set her free and the Entity swallowed the world.

She wonders what became of him.

But David’s got her by the shirt collar and is about to wind one up on her with that rugby hammer of his. When he hears her pathetic squeak of protest, he lowers his paw (after considerable hesitation).

Clearly, they think she has made some huge mistake, and they’re all about to get another unwanted visit from the Entity.

 _What’ll it be this time?_ their crestfallen faces seem to implore. _Locusts? Spiders? Vampire samurai?_

_And-a-mutated-partridge in-a-demented-pear-treeee..._

“Where the _fuck_ were you?” David roars, so hard his ears go red.

“Costco,” she mutters. “Free sample giveaway.”

He does not appreciate her newfound sense of humor.

“You disappeared!”

He drops her, and she crashes back against an overturned crate. Ah, camp. Still in shambles. Still horribly drab and chilly, but nothing will ever be as cold or bleak as her bare hands struggling with those screeching hooks in the freezing winds of Mt. Ormond.

She cranes her stiff neck. _Fire’s alive_ . Its glow spreads across all their cracked faces in golden ribbons. Transparent kintsugi. Her strength returns, flows into her in waves. _And the rain’s stopped_. She glances up at a razor-thin moon. It appears to be hiding. She knows better than to trust appearances.

“What are you smiling about?” Claudette demands. “Weren’t you just in a trial?”

“Yes,” she answers weakly.

The others exchange terrified looks.

“The Entity took you, alone. Not us?” Jake asks.

“Guess you missed the _Groupon_ deal. Sorry.”

They’re really leaning in now, studying her closer than a specimen spread on a mounting board.

“I asked it to,” she explains, and trails off. Not knowing really _how_ to explain, how she had known what to do with her blood. She swallows glass, her throat a tube of sandpaper. The unpleasant, stomach-emptying sensation of falling hasn’t yet lift her. Like stepping out of a high-speed elevator on acid and…

And she can feel his seed, drying on the insides of her thighs. She slams her legs shut and curls up into a ball tight enough to pass for an armadillo.

“Fuck, I’m dizzy.”

She groans, and her head droops against the crate with a thud.

David, to his credit, fetches a bottle of whiskey. She takes a deep pull of cheap amber, lets the sting burn off some of the adrenaline lingering in her bloodstream. She looks around their campsite. As far as she can tell, nothing else has been destroyed (but that’s not saying much).

“Tell us everything!” Claudette cries.

_Everything?! I don’t even want to write in my stupid diary about this one._

She groans again.

Jake insists, “Quickly, now! So we have time to prepare.”

David cracks his knuckles and glowers at the woods like he’s expecting bad company.

 **_I love you_ , **_he had said. Declared. Like it was always that way, like he’s always known. But I went there by_ **_mistake_** _. He didn’t even write that message!_

_Unless, of course, he’s lying. Killers are known to do far worse things than fib._

She uncurls, gets up. Walks over to the fire and sticks her hands as close as she dares to the blazing coals, until they nearly torch her nails.

_No fucking way he said that. Must have imagined it. When I go back into my tent, that message won’t even be there, will it?_

_Because this is how the bad things_ **_always_ ** _start. With an illusion._

_A lie._

_But the storm always follows..._

Fitfully, she rubs the side of her face, her neck. There are bruises from his lips there now to match the bite. But is that even his? Or is it another lie, like the message? Not like she got the chance to ask him, when he was full-body-leveling her like a fleshed-out dozer, groaning lustily behind her.

She shakes her head. 

_Who wrote that bullshit? And did that someone, not the Entity, trash our camp?_

“Hello!” Claudette cries impatiently. “We’re still here, in case you haven’t forgotten!”

She stares into the dancing, animated tongues of orange and yellow. Pirouetting figures, graceful acrobats. Performers and slaves.

“I was angry. I asked the fire, er, the Entity to take me to the Ghostface. It did. There were three others—Kate, Ace, and Feng.”

“ _AND_ ? How did _THAT_ go?”

David looks about ready to pummel her. Jake is stoic and thoughtful; Claudette, withdrawn and concerned.

She laughs, and they draw back like she's fired a gun. But she's unable to contain her satisfaction any longer.

It cuts through all the confusion, and she can see how her victory lights up their faces in slow motion. Holding up four fingers, she declares, 

“All four of us escaped through the hatch. WE WON.”

“No shit?” Jake curses softly. Music to her ears.

The others burst into collective excitement. Claudette lets out a ‘whoop!’ and looks like she wants to hug her. David pumps his fist and takes the biggest draught of whiskey she’s ever witnessed.

“Fuck yeah! That means the others’ll be coming to see us, won’t it?” he crows.

“It certainly means good news,” Claudette says, with a reserved smile. 

“Perhaps future alliances are in store,” Jake adds. “God willing, some medical supplies. Food. Water. _Soap_.”

She smirks. _And the wizard’s in his fucking tower in the Emerald City, and he’s requested our audience._

Jake puts his hands on his slim hips.

“We had better clean this dump up, before they arrive.”

David, Claudette, and she nod like good little henchmen. As they get to work, she regales them—sparingly—about the trial, how she sabotaged the hooks, how they scrambled to the hatch before he could kill Feng Min. She leaves out so much, it starts to feel like someone else’s story. The devil’s in the details, but they don’t need to know about those.

The more she reflects, the quieter she becomes, despite David nagging her, offering her shots and pointers about how to avoid a guaranteed strike from an opponent.

“The key is to dodge 'em at the last second, see, ya gotta have the proper footin’-”

The closer the hour draws to the visit, the more she drifts into steely silence. She recalls the ‘thing’ Kate had screamed at. Whatever had bowled her off the hill, it hadn’t been Ghostface or an avalanche or a bomb. The other three **_saw_ ** something.

And that **something** saw them.

It might have even gone after them.

But of course, she has no idea what ‘it’ even is. Just a bad feeling.

Then again maybe she’s just insane. This place tends to fray one’s nerves, after a while.

So she spares her weary companions the worry (for now), only parcels out the need-to-know’s. Though, she would commit bloody homicide to see Claudette’s reaction when she admits she and the Ghostface ( _Jesus Christ, that really is worse than only knowing someone’s Tinder username_ ) screwed each other silly on the floor of a hellish hotel.

Speaking of.

She breaks away after several hours of intense labor, wiping sweat from her brow. She feigns needing a breather and crawls straight down, into her tent. The air inside smells of rain, dead leaves. A perfume of decay.

The message is still there, on the ceiling. She raises a finger to trace the letter ‘D’ in **_Delightful._**

_Who the fuck laid here and wrote that, if it wasn’t him?_

_And, oh God, why does that disappoint me so?_

Perturbed, she lays flat on her back, her bleached, cropped, chin-length hair splayed on her pillow. Breathes, letting her chest rise and fall. Up, down. One hand absently creeps up to her shirt collar, rests there like a child’s hand. She has to feel her own heartbeat.

It is racing.

She primes her ears. The others are on the opposite side of camp. Not even their chatter reaches her: Claudette’s inter-dimensional theories, David’s inebriated grunts, Jake’s sage encouragements. It’s nice, to be alone. To think. Although she is unkempt company. She could really use a shower, covered in sweat and lest she forget, the aftermath of their sex.

His scent is _still on_ _her_ , even after being transported between worlds, after working for hours.

She rolls over and presses her face into the lumpy pillow. That’s definitely some kind of fancy cologne: musky and strong, with just a hint of leather. 

_Fuck._

She rolls over again. Stares at those painted scarlet letters. _Someone_ played the role of matchmaker. If it wasn’t him, it was somebody else that had _wanted_ them to meet.

Had **they** known this would happen? And, damn her to hell—her mind is a cauldron of churning emotions and confusion—but regret is _nulla ingrediens_ , and its absence enhances, exaggerates every note and flavor.

Staring at those loathsome letters, she admits selfishly, brazenly: she wants _more_.

He was the _best fucking feeling_ she’s had in a long, long time, trapped in an endless cycle of death and resurrection, hunted and slaughtered, he came out of nowhere like a calamity from the sky and knocked her right out of this _hateful_ orbit in darkness she’s been caught in.

 _Fuck it._ She’s safe in her tent, right? She _knows_ she shouldn’t be doing this, but it feels _so good_ not to think, not to over-analyze, to connive and scheme. She focuses on how he felt inside her at his deepest. Her hand slips down past the rim of her jeans, the other slides under her open collar and works at her breast, teases a nipple until its stiff and tenting her shirt.

The usual Rolodex of random fantasies, porn clips, things she used to watch as a normal stressed woman with a 9-5 job and bills and ordinary problems, don’t even make guest appearances. _He_ takes center stage, this masculine devil in black and red, a mix of an underfed Ron Livingston, all dark eyes and messy hair and Cillian Murphy’s sultriest voice, whose name she doesn’t even know, whose lips she’s only kissed once.

The kind of guy you would pass over at the office and never notice how his eyes ravish, devour, possess your image, when you walk away.

Her breath hitches as she works herself between the legs, under the tattered covers of her sleeping bag. She pushes some of his cum around and uses it as a lubricant, but she doesn’t need it; she is so slick with want (she shoves it back inside with two fingers, anyway), and if this man whose name she does not know could read minds, he’d probably be _all ears and eyes_ for this, to see how vulnerable she is, how needy, his mere memory making a gasping idiot of her…

She bites her hand as she comes, slams her eyes shut, and hears-

_ZAP!_

The body of a moth, open-winged and limp, falling to the wooden porch, but it never makes an impact.

It plummets through space eternally, and it makes her soul sigh from a gentle sort of agony.

**

She washes up in a stream, all on her lonesome.

Using half a grubby soap bar, it’s too cold to strip down and really exfoliate and _scrape_ things away like she _wants to_ , so she settles for the ‘gas station method’ of cleansing her poor, bruised anatomy in portions with a towel. She did manage to boil some water in a kettle, and she scrubs her hair like its going out of style (which, stuck in a dimension where such things no longer matter, it already has).

Once she’s good and purified—as pure as a woman like her can get in a nightmare like this—she pulls on her spare clothes, a combination of faded grays and blacks, and trounces in unlaced boots back to camp, shivering all the way.

Kate, Ace, and Feng Min have already arrived. True to Jake’s predictions, they have brought a case of supplies with them. A tradition, a gesture of thanks and good will.

They gather around the fire and pass around mugs of booze, morsels of food, things that they have scavenged in these woods or which mysteriously appeared between trials. Small talk is ample and plenty. She struggles to pay attention and care about it all, the way she used to back in the real world.

Some things never change.

Once they have all observed this ancient rite of fireside dining, the spotlight of their weary gazes falls on her, and she hates it.

Kate is looking at her strangely. Feng Min stands with her arms folded. Ace has a smirk on his face.

“Damn, they got you guys staying at the Luxor here, don’t they?” he comments, and puffs on his cigar. Just like that, he sweeps away hours of work they have put in to make their camp presentable.

 _Are you sure Ace isn't a killer?_ a stray thought interrupts.

She brushes her cynicism away. She is not a moron. Ace might have a permanent poker face, but she knows the real reason for their visit: her. Or rather, this nebulous cloud of fucked up shit surrounding her.

“We wanted to officially thank you for your help,” Kate tells her. “If you hadn’t messed with the hooks, distracted the killer, we’d all be somethin' like road kill, right about now.”

“Speak for yourself, my Southern Belle,” Ace laughs. “I’m always the guy with the key.”

 _And the one who nearly pissed himself when he saw something in the snow,_ she seethes. _Coward._

Feng Min winces. There’s no sign of the brutal treatment she’d received, but memory is a persistent son of a bitch.

“Don’t mention it,” she tells them all. 

_Really,_ **_please don’t_** _._

Ace champs on his cigar, grinning sardonically.

“We wanted to ask you _how_ , exactly, ya ended up in _our_ trial? Exchanges between groups don’t happen very often. VIP sections, red tape, all that _basura_.”

He makes a grand sweeping motion.

She has been expecting this question, and she explains it to them the exact same way she had the others. How her blood had summoned her, how the desire for revenge had consumed her. And so much more convenient than riding the subway!

“So, you believe the Entity wanted you to have your revenge?” Kate asks. “That’s why it granted your little wish?”

“Who knows what the Sky Spider wants,” she answers truthfully, amused at how 'sky spider' really rolls off the lips. “All I know is what happened. Same as you guys.”

 _And I don’t know why none of you is bringing up the_ **_thing_** , _but all this pussyfooting around is starting to tick me off._

_Also, I’m scared shitless._

“Wasn’t that a good thing, though?” Claudette pipes up. “What she did?”

“Oh yes, _very_ good,” Feng Min smiles. “We returned to our camp to find the extra supplies. A few more amenities. Ramen noodles, lotion, stuff like that. Er, what about you guys?” 

“Uh,” David grunts, rubs the back of his sheared head. “It stopped raining.”

“Yeah,” Jake sighs. “We’ve been having sort of a rough spell, lately. But that seems to have broken.”

“Eh, you hit a lucky streak,” Ace dismisses. “Happens to everyone.”

“Yep, _luck_ is all it was,” she interjects icily, despite her better judgement. But his attitude has made her prickled as a porcupine.

“Maybe more than luck,” Ace amends. Carefully, making direct eye contact with her. He ashes his cigar into their fire.

“Keep up the good work,” Kate concludes, looking them each in the eye. She has a performer’s stare, knows how to make everyone feel noticed. Special.

Placated.

“Thanks,” Jake responds. “We’ll do our best. Can we expect to see you all again soon?”

“Oh, I would expect that, all right,” Ace tells him. He hands an eager David a box of cigars and a bag of booze.

“Damn, thanks buddy!”

“Here. We can’t stay, but this is a promise to get trashed with ya’ll sometime. Crush you in cards, maybe. David you look like you play a mean game of Canasta.”

“I do. And we would like that,” David says, the gifts dwarfed by his giant hands. “Your campsite?”

“We think it’s best we continue to come here,” Feng answers, a bit hasty.

 _They don’t trust us. They don’t trust me_ , she muses. _This was just to find out what kind of people we are. Who I am._

An unsettling question, to say the least.

“That’s fine,” Claudette says. As if they have a choice. “I’ll brew us a lovely meadow tea. Boosts the spirit, you know.”

“I would love that,” Feng Min says, and it’s genuine, as far as she knows.

The three outsiders exchange glances again, before they pack up and head back into the woods. The trek to their larger camp, which she has only seen once at a distance, is several miles.

“Don’t let the thorns hit you in the ass on your way back,” she mutters, once they’re well out of earshot.

She heads back into her tent not long after, and lets out an exhausted sigh as she flops down onto her bedding.

Her hip lands on something hard and small.

“Fucking rocks,” she mutters, reaching down to worm through her sleeping bag.

Her hand emerges like a shark out of dark water. Clutched in her fingers is an old Nokia phone, a ‘brick’, they used to call them.

She pulls the covers over her head, licking dry lips. Making sure the glow is muted, she presses a button.

The screen lights up. There is the start of a text message.

(How in the fuck is there a phone here in the middle of the woods and oh God how did it get here it wasn’t here before and-)

She opens the Inbox, to see a series of texts laboriously typed out. No AIM chatroom lingo, here. Whoever typed these is an experienced writer, and he has been _very_ _chatty_.

_You couldn’t even make it a few hours without thinking about me, couldn’t you? You dirty little girl. I see I’ve made quite the impression on you._

_Don’t worry. Nobody saw me. And for the record, no, I didn’t write the message._

_The bite wasn’t me, either. How’s your neck, darling? I noticed it when I had my lips on you, and I gotta admit, it made me kinda jealous (and super horny)._

_But like I said, I’m SO glad we found each other! Best keep this device our little secret, though. Just think of it as your own private line to Satan, howzaboutit?_

_Now, you’re probably wondering how I know you violated yourself in that little shoe box you call a tent. But a great magician, and a practiced serial killer (hey, you were thinkin it, so I'll just say it), never reveals his secrets._

_And I do so enjoy watching you_ **_squirm_** _._

_So, let’s agree not to make this a big deal. Not yet, anyway. There are more important questions that need asking._

_Like do you want to see me again? Enlighten me, grace me with your Y or N!_

_Oh, and best you don’t keep me waiting._

_My boss is a real_ **_prick_ ** _about numbers, and I’m a busy guy._

_-GF_

**

She shoves the phone under her pillow. Rolls over, as prone and rigid as plywood. Her spine is soaked in cold sweat.

Of course she doesn’t text that monster back. She’d be insane to. Utterly out of her goddamned skull, and she’s had her brains bashed in on numerous occasions to know how unpleasant that is.

She tries to get some sleep. A laughable attempt that reminds her of the cackling of crows, of ravens. Somewhere in the dark, an owl hoots. Something shrieks, dies.

After several hours, the phone lights up with a ( _ZAP!)_ and she sits up with a start.

_What’s the matter, feeling shy?_

_Well, don’t fret. I’ll have us reunited in short order._

_**Nothing, nobody,** _ **_can keep you from me_.** _Funny, I don’t even know your name, but I that’s just how I feel about you._

_Be seeing you, real soon. And I meant what I said, when I dropped you down the hatch. It wasn't just pillow talk._

_ <3 GF _

Her head is a haunted moor, shrouded in midnight. A forbidden territory she's mortified to traverse, but someone has thrown her across the open door, put her out on her feet like an unwelcome cat.

Before she even knows what’s happening, what's real anymore, the fog invades her tent and is sweeping her off.


	7. The Makings of an Addict (As Good as Dead)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Danny,” she repeats. Rolls the syllables on her tongue._
> 
> _He cannot contain a shudder when he hears his name spoken from her lips, and he gets rock-hard against her thigh._
> 
> _“They never did catch you.”_
> 
> _She knows he’s smiling under that mask. She can see it in her head, because he wants her to._
> 
> _“And they never will.”_
> 
> _This is the moment, then. She’s ready for him to take out every disgusting impulse, every homicidal urge, and dispense with her like the pathetic toy that she is._
> 
> _But he climbs off instead, retreating from the spot._
> 
> _“And you’re not gonna get off that easy tonight. Let’s have a little fun, shall we?”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Weeeell I wasn't gonna post an update so soon after the last one, but fuck it, it's Tuesday, work sucks ass, and I wanted to write me some steamy fucking SMUT.
> 
> Please take heed of the warnings for this fic, especially concerning this chapter.
> 
> I hope you enjoy. <3

The streetlights seem to flicker just for her. Lovely, soft glowing golden orbs, each with a buzzing cloud of gnats haloing them, like noisy atoms in a vacuum. 

She hovers on a quiet neighborhood street. A creeping fog worthy of Silent Hill has rolled in ( _sans_ Pyramid Head, she prays). Patriotic red, white, and blue flashes from the police cars and the scattered tea-lights from a seance of jack o’ lanterns punctuate the murkiness, like phantom ships lingering out at sea. These are Myers’ haunting grounds, but she knows, _dreads,_ before she can even check the technological relic in her hand, who the real shape of evil in this town is.

And he has a fucking texting problem.

The speed, the accuracy and the _hastiness_ in which the messages come flying in unnerve her.

 _Welcome to Haddonfield,_ the squat screen blows up with gray pixel blocks. Stacked tombstones.

 _All of these units are available for sale. The prior owners were real_ **_deadbeats._ **

_Up and left the place. Must have heard about the new neighbor moving in! A journalist, of all people._

_Best hope he’s not one of those creepy New England-writer types._

She can hear him chuckling, in her head, a low knell. It makes her queasy, opening these texts. To think about how, somewhere nearby, he is hunched down, thumbs plugging like he’s the first _homosapiens_ to discover instantaneous communication with a frightened but available woman.

He does this, while possibly stalking her, knife at the ready. Or one of her teammates, whoever they are. Now that she and the others have had a taste of victory, she will fight, tooth and claw and wing, before she lets their good fortune go.

It’s time to get to work against this fucking psycho.

But first, a reply. Don’t want to be rude.

 _k_ , she sends. The patterned keys familiar and foreign to the touch.

It takes him a few seconds; she’s irked him with her monosyllabic parry (has a single character incited more rage amongst her generation)? She hopes it has the intended effect of making him irrational, stupid.

Bing! New message.

_Uncharacteristically blunt, for a bitch who barks at me even when I have a knife against her esophagus._

_Your thumbs will remember their old muscle memories, I think._

_...But does your pussy remember, what I did to it?_

No, it does not have the desired effect.

It shames her, how quickly he causes a jolt between her legs. A twitch of electricity, and it’s not the malfunctioning telephone pole sputtering above her.

Only by the grace of God does she not hurl the phone into the window of the nearest cop car. She will need it, if she’s to divine what kind of demented scheme he’s hatched.

Because this _will_ _only_ _end_ in bloodshed. In a gory consumption. Screams. A whole genocide’s worth.

It _always_ does, with these beasts, these ragged demigods. This is most assuredly a ploy, an arrangement to bring her closer to ruin. Difficult to do, when one has more lives than a beehive has holes, but she is still a creature with a mind and habits and a personality (a good one, she hopes), and when you strip those things away, one by one, a raw and exposed mind—even an undying one—is a _very_ tender, malleable thing. Meat in a jar.

And he does so love to work with fresh product, doesn’t he?

With a disconcerted cry and clutching the phone to her breast, she shrinks down against a battered police cruiser. She _longs_ for a feeling of security. Of safety.

But all that greets her in the darkened glass—no concerned, Officer Fatherly Figure, no Sgt. Badass Defender with a gun.

Only her own small, pale, terrified reflection.

**

_Do you know why I asked the Entity to bring you here?_

_Other than the fact that it was mighty_ **_displeased_ ** _with my last match. Seriously woman, you have no idea, the agonies I’ve been through would make_ _Nine Inch Nails 'The Fragile' sound like the 'Sound of Music'._

 _He_ has the _gall_ to complain about pain? She winches her tongue between her teeth until she tastes copper.

_But that’s all right. Pain is a fastidious priest, and I am his hungry acolyte._

_Penny for your thoughts: Were you raised Catholic, by any chance? You strike me as a gal with a guilt complex. So eager to perform. To please._

As she approaches the nearest empty house, she wonders how this idiot possibly finds the time to text so much and see his senseless murders out. Well, let him chat. The more time he wastes formulating clever (disturbing) pickup lines, the less he has to eviscerate someone.

She creeps up the rickety stairs and gets to work on the second floor gen, keeping her ears primed.

It only takes a few seconds, before he’s in her head again. A red flash, intravenously behind her pupils, and it’s pure devilry.

_By now you’re plugging away on a gen, like the dutiful ex-Catholic girl that you are._

_You’re thinking about the welfare of your teammates, and it’s endearing. I like that about you._

_It’s...almost motherly._

Her hand slips. She corrects course, unsheathing some wires from a tube like a neurosurgeon unsheathes a spinal sac.

She gets the damned thing almost near-functioning, her fingers and wrists coated in thick oil, the blood of ancient beasts on her hands.

Just when a little victory is about to hit, that’s when the phone vibrates in her back pocket. Between the fossilized crude and her fingers, she reads:

_I am rotten, on the inside._

_This...‘existence’...as the others call it, this ‘half-life’, isn’t working out so well for me._

_I crave something more._

She is craving a restraining order, a cease and desist, a-

... _Sorry for the confessional talk._

_I always get a little reflective before I kill._

The phone clatters to the floor. She snatches it up, sweating bullets. Machine oil bleeds into the keys.

She hastily types back,

_Don’t. PLEASE._

She raises her head. Listens out the busted window in this shell of a house where no family or couple has lived for ages. The air stinks of a bookstore crypt.

Silence.

She looks down. No new messages.

Someone is about to die.

**

Her gen lights up the old Victorian, and she flees with the rest of the cockroaches out the front door. Starts pounding down the street, one hand clawed around the phone.

“Don’t!” she screams. Then, feeling foolish, because she still doesn’t know his name:

“Ghostace! ANYONE? Look out!”

The thick fog eats her cries like The Blob eats panicked Royersfordians. She blurs past fences, trees, trashcans and police barricades. All these signs of law enforcement around, but not a damn cop to be found.

_Where is that police brutality when I need it?_

Speaking of brutal things...she doesn’t see, until she gets to the end of the street.

That's where he’s done it.

A strangled, aghast sound rises up unbidden from her throat and pops.

A man she’s never seen before lays spread akimbo and cut open in great, enthusiastic slashes. Gutted, like a grizzly guts a salmon. His long, tangled black hair is brushed back and matted. Eyes wide open and hard, as lifeless as two marbles.

The intricate tattoos on his arms are flayed to colorful, fleshy ribbons. His considerably large, roped intestines raise a cloud of steam and stink in the open air. He was a big guy, and he had a lot of guts. Lotta heart, too.

Jesus, all the blood...dear God. The crimson police lights highlight it, render it with a hellish lens-flare that stops her own heart from beating.

She has forgotten how to breathe, how to **be**. All that she is or ever was is this poor, slaughtered young man in front of her.

Until:

BZZZZZT, BZZZZT. Like a bug zapper, the phone vibrates, and she swears by the sting it _shocked_ her hand.

She shrieks and spins away from the corpse, fighting the urge to vomit. **Why** does he have to go about it like this, so **fucked up** and **wrong** and _painful_? Can’t he see she’s gonna pop, lose her mind, get shipped off to the Big Survivor Looney Bin the Sky?

The phone’s silent mode zaps her mercilessly.

_Meet Jeff. He didn’t run so good._

_Too much time in front of the art easel, less behind a treadmill. Had fun huntin’ him down, pokin’ holes in him. Dude leaked like a fucking warm sprinkler all over my best leather._

_Probably not the first time that sensitive flower’s done that for a daddy like me, amirite?_

_I got pictures of his tats, before I sliced em into chipped beef. You would probably like these._

_I’ll show em to ya when we’re cuddled in bed someti-_

ENOUGH. She is going to puke, for real.

She keypresses her reply while cowering in some hedges, uncaring about her poor grammar. Her disheveled mind has no space for it.

_Shut the FUCK UP, you sic fuk._

_You think ths is funny?_

_If its me u want, leave the others ALONE._

_U can have me.._

She waits in agonized silence for his reply, gnawing her lower lip.

Then:

_I appreciate your selfless invitation, but I don’t need it._

_Also, for a millennial female, your phone etiquette is horrendous. We will work on that._

She chews her lip to bloody pieces.

_Ticktock. Don’t you have better things to do than hide in your cocoon?_

She pops her head up like a prairie dog and surveys her surroundings.

No one is watching her, yet it’s like he can see inside her head. Like she’s a letterbox and he is the filmmaker, arranging his shots **just** the way he wants them.

The phone shakes jovially. She looks down.

_OMG, this kid is wearing a fucking ice cream uniform. You can’t make this shit up._

_Just when I think the Entity hates me, it provides me with SO MUCH. Before you get all jealous, that’s not even including YOU, my dear._

She looks at dozens of houses, wondering which one he's texting her from, targeting these people...

_He and his skeleton girlfriend are on the basement generator. They make a really cute couple; I admit it. A shame I’m about to turn their ‘Wet Hot American Summer’ into ‘Sleepaway Camp’._

_You ever see that flick? The chick has a penis. Big spoiler!_

_SO BORED. They just keep plugging away at that gen like it’s gonna dispense a million dollars when they’re done._

_What’s your favorite scary movie?_

Scowling resolutely, rising up from the bushes with a crown of twigs in her hair, she sends,

_Ez._

_The Evil Dead._

_lots of weapons._

She pockets the phone and starts running for the next house. But of course it’s the wrong one, and it’s fucking desolate. The only basement here is the **noisy** **one** she dares not enter under any circumstances. Not without a boomstick.

Feeling like she’s running in circles, she darts out onto the roof. Stands on top of it like the Thing from _It Follows_.

A shadow passes the window of the house, across the street. Inside.

The tiny brick basement window, barely visible from street view, is lit up.

Mortified, she starts screaming and waving her arms, jumping up and down.

“GET OUT OF THE HOUSE GET OUT OF THERE HE’S COMING!”

She slips, nearly falls off the cunting roof, but recovers and scrambles down to the first floor and-

Bzzzzzt!

Cringing, she whips out the phone.

An image is downloading.

She clicks it, sick to her stomach. Leans, against the chipped wooden post, for support, while a jack o'lantern laughs at her from its shade in the corner.

He sent her a grainy _selfie_. That red and black devil mask of his is leaning chummily between a teenage boy and girl, both with filthy rags stuffed in their mouths. The boy has a black eye, a laceration on his handsome scalp, thick brown hair and a folded white cap on and, true to the Ghostface’s word, he’s wearing some kind of naval uniform. His girlfriend is wide-eyed staring at the camera, confused. Frightened.

Despairing. This has happened to her before, and it will happen again. And again.

And again.

 _Leave them alone!_ she types, but doesn’t send.

What good is begging? It’s done jack shit. About time she asked the holy question: What Would Ash Do?

Ash would say fuck the Entity, grab a branch, and put the beatdown of the century on this cretin. Alas, she is shite with weapons, but she _does_ have a trick up her sleeve. One she’s never thought of, until this point.

 _If u harm a hair on their heads,_ she sends. _i’ll kill myself. And u wont get to have ur fun._

His reply is instant:

_...Can I get a rain check on that empty suicide threat?_

_‘U’ and I both know ‘u’ don’t have the courage to do it._

_‘U’ love this too much._

_And I love ‘u’ too much to let that happen. <3 _

She feels like crying, like laughing and climbing back up and flinging herself off the roof straight onto her spine, but instead she runs across the street, over to the vacant, horribly quiet house. Sneaks down to the basement, scraping away cheesy floral wallpaper under her nails.

Under a swinging light bulb, the boyfriend and girlfriend are bound together with ropes. Their throats have been slit, to the point where she can see white bone gleaming. They look like a quintessential 80s couple. Nothing but bright futures and a Bill Clinton presidency ahead of them.

Now all that’s ahead of them is a very bad time in the Entity’s woods.

“Sick,” she starts to gag a mantra.

“Sick, sick, sick…”

She spins around, feet pounding the creaking slats like every basement boogeyman in the world is after her.

But it’s only _one_ boogeyman, and he is doing **everything** to make sure he stays that way for her.

**

His final kill she witnesses out in the open. A true showman; he would have it no other way.

Before she can even tinker with the notion of fixing the gen near a tetanus-infested swingset, a ripe scream, ripped from a fresh throat, erupts down the street.

 _I have nothing left to gain,_ the phone displays ominously. Somberly.

She is out of time. She rises, spins, and runs in the direction of murder, watching the texts come flying in.

_Nothing waits, festers inside of me._

_It took away all that I loved about my sad, twisted life._

_My fame. My notoriety. My freedom. My humanity, such as I left it._

_All this, and nothing. Blank pages._

_Until YOU came along._

Her boots pound wet tar; dead leaves crunch. The police lights dance, flutter in crystalline revolutions of fiber optics and glass. Her breath comes in apoplectic spurts and stutters.

She arrives in the middle of the street, in front of the Myers Residence, where past murderers have stalked and killed babysitters of yore.

 **Clunk**! The phone clatters to the pavement.

Now, powerless to do anything except stare, she serves as a live witness, a spectator to the Ghostface chasing down a young, voluptuous Latina woman in skinny jeans and a striped t-shirt. She bleeds profusely from a puncture wound to her abdomen, crying and sobbing so loud it carries with the wind.

She is full to the brim with the will to live and it’s truly **awful** to hear the yelps and pleas to _Dios_ from her cherry lips as he tackles her from behind, gets her on her belly and savagely pins her down with a curb stomp to her lower back, the echo of which twinges in her own spine.

It brings her, shocked, to her knees, this violence.

"It's time to crack into that pinata, bitch!" he roars, and it's the most vulgar, terrible thing she's ever heard.

He stabs the fallen woman furiously, dozens of times. Hundreds. She loses count. He has beyond butchered her. He has dehumanized her.

She gets the sick feeling that he is taking it out on the others to show her he is capable of **restraint** with her, and she squeezes her weeping knees together. Shuts her ears to the wet punctures of flesh, the tearing, the _clink!_ as the knife clears through a body and strikes hard surfaces, the moans that grow softer by the second, til there are none left.

When he’s finally finished, his black robes are weighted down and glistening, anointed by the sacrifice of his quarry.

He seizes the corpse by the meat of its stiff shoulders and brings it up like a prized trophy, taking several pictures with that fucking camera.

Then he lets the dead woman drop, with a sickening _splat!_ , face down in a pool of her entrails.

He laughs and tucks the camera away. He stands up. Does some stretches, rotating his shoulders. Saunters over to her.

Finds her on her knees, crying, on top of a manhole.

“That’s not the hatch, sweetheart. But I can’t blame you for trying. Were you waiting here long for me?”

The knife oozes thick rivulets blood, inches away from her face. 

His crotch is close, too. She can smell him. Animal scents of hide and iron and musk.

Just like that, her mind slips, shifts into a different stream.

“You miss it, don't you? The way things used to be. Back when you were just Jed Olsen. When you were free of this place,” she reflects, absent.

Abject horror, shock, and indifference have made quite the monk of her. She sees him clearly, now.

He is evil, wrapped in wrath and shadow.

He lowers himself, puts his hands on her shoulders, soaking her in blood and viscera, and he topples her over like she’s a doll. They land, entangled in one another, on a swath of razor grass.

“Wrong." He gives her cheek a little love tap.

“I am _not_ him. Jed was a nobody. It’s Danny Johnson to you.”

Warm blood trickles down, around her ear and onto the fluted blades that tickle and prick her nose.

“ _Danny,_ ” she repeats. Rolls the syllables on her tongue.

He cannot contain a shudder when he hears his name spoken from her lips, and he gets rock-hard against her thigh.

“They never did catch you.”

She _knows_ he’s smiling under that mask. She can see it in her head, because he wants her to.

“And they never will.”

This is the moment, then. She’s ready for him to take out every disgusting impulse, every homicidal urge, and dispense with her like the pathetic toy that she is.

But he climbs off instead, retreating from the spot.

“And you’re not gonna get off that easy tonight. Let’s have a little fun, shall we?”

**

She rolls over. Gets up, genuinely surprised her legs still function despite the quaking. Danny waits patiently for her, standing in a nocturnal breeze, holding out his wet, bloodstained hand like he’s the fucking Phantom of Lampkin Lane or something.

The distance she crosses to reach him—a mire of weeds, spiderwebs, and overgrowth—is forever and an instant at the same time. As though she floats through a dream.

When she gets to him, the tips of their scuffed, muddy boots knock lightly. He smirks at this, and he’s _still_ smirking in a fiendish way when he removes his horns, lets them drop. The scowl line on his smooth, pale cheek is enough to drive her wild, and she pushes forward on instinct to touch her lips to it.

He lets her, a quick peck, before he grabs the sides of her face and kisses her _properly_. He forks his tongue in her mouth, tasting her, letting her taste him while she makes enticing sounds of want. She is _trembling_ with it.

She will shatter where she stands rooted, now, without his touch. The next gust of wind will reduce her to ashes and dust.

He will not have it any other way: her, begging him, like this.

“Say my name,” he instructs, pushing her chin up with a finger.

She does.

“ _Danny_.”

“Good,” he purrs. “Don’t wear it out.

I’ve thought of a better use for that mouth, anyway.”

Like a proper lapdog, she catches his drift and again sinks to her skinned knees. Only this time, instead of a bloodcurdling sight, she’s eye-to-eye with his zippered erection. Soon no longer zippered—she gets him out in zero seconds flat. He chuckles deeply above her, and she freezes, unsure.

“ _Go on_. I know you could use a distraction.”

She coils and glares like a viper. One whose fangs are dangerously close to the jut of his arrogant manhood.

“Like a hole in my head.”

He taps the drying blade against his thigh. He does so _hate_ when things get dry.

“I can arrange that. You could do with a lobotomy. Or five.”

She continues glaring up at him while taking his length into her warm fist, pumping him lightly (though he doesn’t need it, his blood vessels could constrict a puppy) and he barely restrains a sigh. This boosts her confidence, and she wastes no further time, starts licking, sucking on his cock, starting with the head. He’s somewhat sticky from his exertions, and he can only watch in sheer, sadistic delight as she noisily cleans him off down to the base, his fingers twisting and yanking a knot of her hair, the other gripping the knife.

He twists even harder, til her scalp turns white, and how she moans at that.

Once she starts _really_ fellating him, he takes control, seizes her by the head and fucks her tight, slippery throat, using neat snaps of his trim hips, huffs of air venting from his flared nostrils. Drool pools at the corners of her mouth and she is making the neediest, greediest sounds that would shame her mother and seven generations of women before her. His blood is already up from all the massacring and he leaves smudges, smears of four innocent people’s trauma-seasoned gore sauce against her cheeks. He won’t last long like this, and he gives **zero flying fucks** because he knows she **savors** this, how quickly she can make him come.

“Fuck,” he breathes, his fingers twisting the roots of her hair. “You are a thirsty fucking whore, aren’t you? You’re really earning that hatch, babe.”

She hums her agreement and slides him _extra_ deep, stretching her sore neck and spine, her toes curling in her boots from the sheer pleasure of _pleasing_ him. With a gutted groan, he releases, shoots thick, hot ropes down her throat. She swallows each, like a thirsty hummingbird to nectar.

“God damn,” he hisses. “Almost _hate_ to have to do this to you, now.”

She flinches, drawing back as if he’s backhanded her. While he’s pulling out, still half-hard, he hefts the knife overhead.

She screams and falls down on her ass. 

“Fuck you, asshole!” she wails.

Betrayed.

Her tears are beguiling. He wants to get out his camera and take a **million** photos of this perfect moment.

Instead he shrugs and tucks his dick away. She eyes the knife like it’s a venomous serpent, but he twirls it and shoves it back in its hiding place, too.

“Just a joke,” he snickers.

She already realizes that, is glowering at him so, but he **always** has to have the last fucking word. He offers her his hand, and she takes it, wiping her lips with her free one. Her huge, swollen pupils are untapped wells brimming with possibilities. Scenarios. 

“Let’s get you to the hatch. The Entity will be pleased with me today. It should pass you over.”

He takes her there, to a nondescript corner of the map. The last place she would look, the first place that occurs to him. They are polar opposites tugging and pushing against one another in a neurochemical duel.

“Though next time, you may want to do more, to help your friends.”

She breaks away from him with a disgusted shove.

 _You’ll come back to these arms_ , he thinks. She has the makings of a fast and furious addict, and his bemused expression denotes such.

“I have questions for you, Danny,” she mutters, feigning free will.

Cute. He can play this game.

“And I have a mighty need for some sleep,” he says, placing his hands on his skinny hips.

“Priorities, love.”

She eyes him, and it’s almost enough to make him diamonds again. Except she’s standing over the hatch without much of a mark on her body at all. Pity.

“Don’t get too comfortable,” she warns.

“Before you go,” he drawls. He grabs one of his belted leather straps and neatly trims it with his knife, fashioning a kind of crude, buckled choker. “Put this on.”

She robotically takes it in her hands, as if receiving a deceased ferret.

“Am I to be your fucking pet, now?”

“Something like that. Although I don’t usually fuck my cat.”

She laughs, her voice box a broken bell, but she obliges his request. It’s snug and tight around her neck, like a little hug. An iota of strangulation.

“How do I look?”

Danny bites his lip. He is _seconds_ away from slamming the hatch shut and really making a submissive animal out of her.

" _Divine._ ”

He sweeps his hand.

“Get going, before I change my mind.”

He doesn’t have to tell her twice. She jumps, leaps into that yawning void, and the last he sees of her is her shock of bleached hair fluttering at him like a moth’s wing.

Or a butterfly caught.

* * *

Desperate deranged talking in my sleep again  
Eyes twitch retain a sentimental something

Looked lorn and we burned and burned  
I was a cinder body soul in my dreams

-Skinny Puppy, 'Addiction'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ohhh so I almost forgot to add, to anyone who did a little math reading this chapter, my OC was meant to be a 'fifth wheel' in the match. It was intentional. ;)


	8. Phenomenon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _He shuts the side screen to the camera. He’d love to continue, to watch her flee to the camp, only to realize it’s all burned to ash._
> 
> _The other survivors, long gone. Off to greener pastures without her. Leaving her isolated and alone, needy for a comforting word, an embrace._
> 
> _The trailer is filling with fog. Duty calls, and the Entity hungers for blood worse than ever._
> 
> _It will be a long while, until they can be together, lock and key, the way he wants. But longing and suffering season the dish. The difference between culinary perfection on a sparkling plate, and reprocessed soylent green presented as a consumable._
> 
> _One is substance, meat, life. The other is manmade illusion. A travesty._
> 
> _It is also the makings of a very good, albeit disturbing, love story._
> 
> _As he disappears, he thinks he really does need to write this shit down._

She should have woken up by now.

Instead she keeps falling into a bottomless pit.

A rusted sky, an inferno, opens up all around. She’s crashing 

down, 

down,

down

into a nightmare, a blend of random campsites and an untitled Beksinski painting ripped from memory—that of miniscule bonfires, separated by sheer towering cliffs, the gulfs plunging into darkness. The void between each lonely flame impossible to traverse. 

Dying embers.

A surreal landscape of complete isolation and torment, the promise of warmth, of companionship, fever dreams at best.

It is into this forlorn expanse that she plummets, and her mouth yawns into a silent scream.

Danny spies on all of this in the open viewfinder of a black camcorder. A truly spectral sight.

There, in this electric prison, he's captured her, a living doll strung on invisible tethers, her clothes spread out behind her like angelic wings. Falling and turning, forever.

“ _What_ _a pretty tooooy, all mine to plaaaaay with_ ,” he sings, under his breath. He drums the camera in sheer excitement. His boot heel taps the tacky floor.

“Even in your nightmares you are beautiful.

... _Especially_ so.”

The Entity makes him privy to these things. He no longer needs night vision, spying devices, schedules or even being within proximity of her to engage in his telepathic voyeurism.

All he has to do is **see**. And there she is.

He sets the camera on a desk with an antique typewriter and mini-TV, in a room that for all intents and purposes resembles his old haunt in Roseville, Florida.

Where an array of photos would normally be of different people (usually women, but plenty of men, too, and all varieties), their schedules and receipts and gum wrappers, a dried human scalp stapled to the wall, newspaper clippings and other objects of morbid obsession, there is one theme, **one** face repeating over and over and over, like the posters spammed on Broadway.

Her.

The apple of his eye, he has photographed her face from every conceivable angle. He sits with his legs thrown open, hunched over this shrine he built to worship. To **obsess**.

All of this, and he still doesn’t know her name.

“But I will have it from your lips,” he murmurs to the falling woman in the camcorder. “If I have to **peel** it from them.”

It doesn’t matter. All that matters is what she means to him.

Thinking about her lips and his knife, he does not hesitate to start fondling himself through his jeans. And then _under._ Remembering the wonderful _sounds_ she had made on her knees, her screams for help as she ran in the streets...

He stops for a moment, frowning. There is a disappointing lack of photos of his paramore from the neck down.

His mouth hooks into a dreamy smile. Oh, he'll change that. How this room will transform! It will be a testament, a lush fresco to their love, with all the parts of her that he devours, ravishes, **splits open** on display.

Giddy, he grips himself in his fist, throws his head back, and **sees**.

...He senses something watching, from the corner of the room. He freezes, lets go of his junk and slowly reaches for the handle of-

 **“ _Don’t look_ ,”** an inhuman voice hisses. Commands. **_“Don’t touch.”_**

He obeys. For now.

A shape hovers, over his shoulder. Looms. He feels the weight of the slim, digital camera in his pocket, resting under the fingers of his free hand.

_**“You’ve been a bad, bad boy, haven’t you Danny? You put other clairvoyants with that name to shame.”** _

_Great, it's a King fan_ , he broods. _Typical. Tasteless._

It seems to sense his defiance, and it presses closer. The sheer weight of its presence alone is enough to break his skin into sickly goosebumps.

Ah, fear. He hasn’t felt it in a long, long time. He almost didn’t recognize it.

It's unpleasant.

_**“Yes, I could kill you. Fortunately, you serve a need. That is the only reason I allow you to continue your wretched existence.”** _

_Who is it?_ he wonders.

 ** _“Whoooo am I?”_** it repeats aloud, with a hollow, sonorous sigh. _**“You will see me, in time. Very soon I will be set free. It was foretold.”**_

“Tell me what you are,” he growls, a threatened animal, and there’s no humanity to it.

It laughs back at him, as cold as a dead planet.

_**“A thread even the Entity cannot spin.”** _

Hearing that name, Danny tilts his head suddenly. A different presence whispers something in his ear (it never stops whispering, really, just grows louder at times). 

It’s here. Protecting him, wrapping its many legs around him in a shell. But just barely. He must not look. He must not touch.

**Click!**

Danny winces as the flash goes off, but it can’t be helped. He takes a photo, over his shoulder, keeping his eyes fixed on **her** face.

He raises the digital camera, looks at the image on the screen, and grins. He turns to the falling woman in the camera. The vision from a Polish artist’s inner hellscape has vanished, replaced with the survivor’s woods.

Home again, home again, jiggity jig.

“There’s much more to you than meets the eye, isn’t there?” he says to her, though he knows she cannot hear him. “Knew there was somethin’ special about you.”

Meanwhile, the thing in the corner has vanished. He has already forgotten about it, giddy again with his discovery.

Speaking of discoveries, she is waking up in the woods—they are being immolated. The trees are burning up like matchsticks.

“You don’t even know **what** you are, do you? The power that’s inside you,” he rambles. “It’s getting **in the way** of our love and it **wants** to be set free. Well, I will be the dutiful gatekeeper and open the world to it.

Which spells bad news for the others. But don’t worry, babe, I’ve got my eyes on you, always.”

He shuts the side screen to the camera. He’d love to continue, to watch her flee to the camp, only to realize it’s all burned to ash.

The other survivors, long gone. Off to greener pastures without her. Leaving her isolated and alone, needy for a comforting word, an embrace.

The trailer is filling with fog. Duty calls, and the Entity hungers for blood worse than ever.

It will be a long while, until they can be together, lock and key, the way he wants. But longing and suffering season the dish. The difference between culinary perfection on a sparkling plate, and reprocessed soylent green presented as a consumable.

One is substance, meat, life. The other is manmade illusion. A travesty.

It is also the makings of a very good, albeit disturbing, love story.

As he disappears, he thinks he really _does_ need to write this shit down.

**

She wakes from a fever dream with a start. Soaked in sweat, but that’s nothing new. There _is_ something new around her neck, however. Heavy and heavily scented, steeped in cologne and alchemy.

Immediately, she tries to take the collar off.

“Fuck! Fuck, are you kidding me right now?”

Of course it won't fucking come off. It’s locked into place by some kind of curse. No matter how her fingers dig and pull at the clasp, it doesn’t budge, as if held together by the world’s strongest magnet.

An insurance policy, in case she decides to change her mind about their ‘relationship’.

_Oh, God._

_I’m in a relationship with a fucking serial killer._

She bolts up, tugging at the collar of her shirt. It’s ungodly _hot_. She smells smoke. As she starts walking towards camp, she sees the flames. The billowing clouds.

The briar patch is incinerated. All of their things are nothing more than black streaks in the dirt, the grass and foliage scorched away like a bad tattoo to a laser.

The worst of the danger has already happened. The flames are guttering out. Whatever force came through here, it’s finished. For now.

It’s not long, when she finds the note. Nailed to a tree that has survived the blaze by someone else who survived it.

She opens it, reads:

_Traitor in the woods,_

_When and if you find this, don’t bother looking for us._

_Jane told us_ _everything_ _. She’s the one he stabbed to death in the street, in case you were too busy doing other things to remember._

_She said you were texting him the entire match, leading him to them. Nancy and Steve said he wouldn’t shut up about how you’re both in love, even when he was killing them. He was bragging to them about you, even as he was opening their throats._

_The others have graciously agreed to take us in._ _Do not come looking_ _._

_You are dead to us._

-CM

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't you just love when a chapter just flows together? Anyway, I figured a short one was needed after that massive bomb I dropped. Hopefully people weren't put off by how long it was. >_>
> 
> A couple of things I need to give credit to: The Beksinski painting referenced is untilted, but you can view it here: https://www.wikiart.org/en/zdislav-beksinski/untitled-1978-1
> 
> I would kill for a map and killer based on his art. It would fit the universe perfectly, no?
> 
> The 'other clairvoyants with your name' line is a Shining reference to Danny Torrance. :)
> 
> The line 'You will see me in time' is a reconstructed line from the Mothman Prophecies. Terrific movie if you're looking for a stylish, creepy film about omens and disasters. It didn't really scare me the way Final Destination did, but it's definitely disturbing and the voice the dude hears on the phone was my main inspiration for this new killer, although the concept is not a mothman, per say. You will just have to keep reading to find out. ;)
> 
> EDIT: Oh! Almost forgot, the telepathic powers he's using were inspired by The Ring. Remember those creepy photos Samara made? Yeah. She even says 'I don't make them, I see them, and then they just are'. I referenced that line as well, slightly.


	9. Interlude

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ello folks. I had originally intended this to be part of the next full chapter, but with all I have written so far, it would be way too long.
> 
> So please enjoy this little 'preview'. :) Thanks to everyone who gave kudos and commented so far, it helps keep this ghost train chuggin' along.

_Never in her darkest dreams could she have imagined she’d come to miss, to crave the demon who punctured her heart like it was a succulent slab of meat. The fiend who butchered her companions for sport, manipulated them into believing she had betrayed them (which she technically had, and how it eats her up with parasitic glut)._

_But that’s_ **_exactly_ ** _the kind of toxicity Danny Johnson injects. He is a highly potent, treacherous drug, and she’s hopelessly addicted._

_Though she doesn’t realize it._

_His draw is subtle. As the moon lures, tugs at the stubborn tide. It takes time. Multiple doses._

_Many, many trials. Some with him, but most without. He begrudgingly lets the others do the work he loves so much: touching her. Penetrating, getting under her skin. It makes him rabid with jealousy, their filthy hands marking her body, but he only uses it to work_ **_harder_ ** _so he can have her._

_He doesn’t even have to make her do anything. Not really. He allows their bond to unfurl its spiny petals, basking in the black sun of their world, growing, stretching, transmuting into an unnatural phenomenon—a unique species of sin, its cannibalistic roots nourished by the flesh and blood of the never-ending circus of fools._

_He dices and cuts through their sea of fragile bodies like a samurai cuts through a bamboo forest. Fuel to their fire._

_You can damn well bet he photographs and documents every kill with sadistic glee. It barely tides him over until she can be_ **_his_** _. The Entity has never been more pleased. All kinds of doors are opening._

_He implements all this, plus a little ingenuity on his part. A dash of emotional engineering. He didn’t make it as a journalist and home-grown serial murderer without the ability to craft a deception._

_This narcissistic psychopath will subject her to the most insidious, the most sickening fusion of torture and perverse fetishes, fantasies. The only way she holds onto her sanity is the knowledge that she will be reborn, that she will wake up whole and healthy (the same cannot be said for her psyche)._

_Until the fog calls her again._

_A strung-out junkie clawing at the sidewalk for her next fix—slowly, surely, over time he breaks, twists, grinds and wears her down—until she’s on scraped, bloody knees screaming at the sky: GOD, WHY?_

_Of course she never gets an answer. Not from God. The devil, however, is all ears._

_It doesn’t happen all at once. Oh, no. He’s a careful technician. He chips, peels, cuts at her defenses the way a skilled butcher dresses a doe. He_ **_will not stop_ ** _until he has her upside-down and opened up, gleaming and wet and vulnerable, delirious with the ache for him._

_All his for the consuming._

_And the most fucked thing about all of this: she’s really, really starting to_ ** _love_** **_it_** _._


	10. Meltdown

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _She spawns into a freakshow factory filled with maniacal contraptions. Torture devices. The workings of a tireless, obsessed mind...but not his._
> 
> _Staring at a pig mask on a shelf, into its slouched, hollow eyes, she is disappointed beyond measure with herself._
> 
> _She has caved. She is, as Ash so eloquently put it, a 'fangirl'. But who else does she have, now, except him?_
> 
> _Then she hears it: a camera shutter._
> 
> _Click! Click!_
> 
> _She turns._
> 
> _Wearing his traditional white mask, he lowers the camera. He waves a black-gloved hand at her, almost shy._
> 
> _She cracks a smile._

She takes the note to the dregs of the fire and tosses it in. As it collapses into a black star, it does little to help her resolve.

But she’s got to try and redeem herself. She can’t continue without other human beings, or she’ll go mad, wandering these moribund lands as a human effigy, a brainless hermit.

She searches and searches, drifts through the chilly barren woods like a wraith exiled from paradise. A very hungry, very pissed-off wraith in need of a shower and a warm bed and some _real goddamned food._

Light footsteps grow heavier by the hour. Her stomach growls louder than the wind moaning in the shriveled branches. There is nothing to eat save for what the others taught her to scrounge: bland, chewy mushrooms, plant roots, acorns. Beetle grubs. 

Thank God she’s not squeamish. When you’ve taken chainsaws to the guts and had your vertebrae disassembled by a katana, eating some horrific stuff out of _Fear Factor_ is small game.

Besides, not like it’s the worst thing she’s swallowed to survive.

She licks her fingers and moves on, dreaming about catching one of those laughing crows that never seem to stop pestering her and having a little grilled bird meat. More and more she finds she craves spilled blood. Carnage.

Entity-cuisine aside, her appetites are about to expand in far stranger ways.

**

She stumbles upon a fence made of logs lashed together with miles of crude rope. It’s no Fort Knox, but it does evoke a sense of safety and power, things she has forgotten.

This is _the_ main survivor camp. Ground Zero. Ash and others built it from scratch. Torches are lit. Aromas waft from cooking fires, their smoke twisting in thin fingers above the treeline, beckoning. Her stomach cramps, folds itself into a crepe. She salivates.

Voices. Laughter. Company. _People._ She’s drawn toward it, despite the warning knell in her heart.

But there’s another, hidden reason she wants in: there’s a good chance someone knows who wrote the message in her tent. Who can explain why her blood teleported her to Mt. Ormond. She seriously doubts anyone else can prick their finger and order express.

She looks up. Two men stand guard above a gate made of corrugated metal. _Christ, they even have a gate_.

Before she can call up to them, her head _pounds_ as if someone’s cracked it with a mallet. With a strangled sound she clutches her temples as red light intercepts her vision. A thin ribbon of blood trickles down her upper lip.

She doubles over, moaning. In her ears, a low, familiar voice purrs,

_You’re so pretty, when you’re falling. I just want to let you dangle like that forever._

_But I can’t touch you in your dreams._ **_Not yet_** _._

She freezes with her head between her legs. Her skull’s about to crack. The people on the wall have noticed her and are running down the catwalk to get a closer look.

She sees who it is, and her dismay ices over to sheer panic. _No no no no no!_

But his voice doesn’t stop. He _wants_ her to look crazy to them.

_Tell me, does this place remind you of something? About the storm, the moths, the house that no longer exists?_

_TELL ME._

“ **NO!** ” she screams.

“Get out of my fucking head!”

And, just like that, he’s gone. Dispelled.

The loneliness crashes in, and it almost snaps her in two. And she's made a proper shizo of herself to these people.

“Who the hell are you yelling at?” Ace shouts down from the high wall. Mutters, “She’s losin’ it. Look at her!”

“Please! Let me in!” She pounds her fist against fence. “It’s not what you think! _I was set up!_ ”

“Oh, really? Then what’s that crap around your neck?” the other hollers down. “Last time I checked, a gal didn’t put jewelry on unless she actually _liked_ it.”

It takes her a second to realize she’s speaking with King Ash himself. She turns red with humiliation, hooking a finger into the collar, hot against her flesh.

“I need help...” she murmurs dryly. Licks her parched lips. “Please.” 

He feigns being hard at hearing. “What? Speak up!”

She blinks back tears. Wipes the blood off.

“I said, I need _help_.”

Ash growls,

“Yeah, the psychological kind. We don’t have the space here for killer **fangirls**. You’re either on our side, or you ain’t. And it looks to me, by that kitten collar like you chose.

Now beat it, or we’ll find somethin' around here to shoo you off with permanently.”

She staggers backwards. What had she expected? Hors d'oeuvres, cocktails, and a fair trial?

Doesn’t make their banishment sting any less.

“Hey, kid!”

She looks up at the grinning gambler, and a searing, raw rage grips her heart. Ace Visconti produces a playing card from thin air, folds it in half and tosses it down at her.

“Good luck next match. You’re gonna need it!”

She catches the fluttering card, unfolds it. The red King of Hearts. 

The one stabbing himself in the head with his own sword.

**

Sensing violence brewing, she flits off without argument. She’s too tired and too ashamed and this is all _so_ _wrong_. 

Back into the wastes with no supplies. Nothing. Maybe she can find another abandoned camp before exposure sets in. Maybe. If she dies here, does she vanish forever? A disturbing thought.

“Hey, lass! Wait!”

Rustling, to her right. David, of all people, pushes through the thorny underbrush and approaches, carrying a handkerchief bundle. He steps up, chest heaving, and hands the weighted parcel over, sweating profusely for an athletic guy, a blush creeping up his neck.

“Here. Don’t wanna see ya starve, now.”

She twists the top knot loose. The bundle contains a box of crackers, a package of dried sausages, cheese, a small bottle of wine, and chocolate, of all things.

_How romantic. Now I can have a suicide picnic for myself._

“David, I-,” she stammers. She could throw her arms around and hug him. “But why? Why help me?”

_Or not._

Because he smirks. Then, in a decidedly _un-David_ manner, he reaches out, touches the collar around her neck and strokes the stiff strip of leather, once. It makes her guts turn to jelly. There’s a twinkle in his eye reminiscent of a sparkling knife tip under stuttering fluorescents.

“Looky here, what’s this?”

He reaches down, towards her jeans. Removes the King of Hearts from where it pokes out of her pocket. He looks down at it, still smirking, and rips it in half, tossing the remains in the air.

“Someone’s gonna have to shove a hook in that cardshark. Flutter away now, little moth,” he tells her, unusually cryptic. His accent is gone. Steely.

“Before the bats come and eat ya.”

David winks. She hovers, shocked.

The fog has swept in while she’s distracted. It swirls around her feet in Sahara-colored clouds. She’s too dismayed to say anything to him. But he’s already fading and the items rain from her fingers.

The mist overtakes and obscures everything.

**

The first thing she hears is a chorus of screams on the television monitors. 

She tries not to look too closely at the footage up there, in the treatment theater. The MK-Ultra horror show reminds of her a bug zapper designed to electrocute and flay the human mind to silly-putty.

_Zzzzzzzzaaap._

“Come! You cannot delay your treatment. Don’t keep your doctor _waiting._ ”

_Zzzzzzzzaaap._

The infernal crackling digs into her skull, makes it impossible to concentrate. The air reeks of formaldehyde and piss. How appropriate that she’s in a fucking madhouse now that she’s starting to hear voices.

But the staff could use some additional bedside manner training.

She flattens herself beneath a gurney, panting hotly. She’s not gonna let this fucker win. But her teammates, who have magically disappeared, are making it difficult.

Cunts.

“I KNOW you’re scared!” strained vocal chords rattle like electrical wires in the wind. He hunts her along the outer ward hallway. Polished shoes smear bloody Rorschach blots into the concrete.

“You’re a _very sick_ girl, but I know what’s best for you. Trust me!”

She rolls out, gets up and hides in a locker. It’s tight and airless as a coffin. She fights to keep her breath quiet, her brain neutralized. She oozes sweat. The crackling undercurrent has her heart rate doing roller coaster dives and corkscrews.

The unnatural signal tastes of metal. Chernobyl. There’s a nuclear swarm in her head and it clamors every time he comes near her with that electric prod of his. Thank God she’s not HIS obsession.

“Why do you run, child? I only want to help!”

_I detect sarcasm. And don’t call me child, that’s fucking gross._

“What’s going on in that head?”

_I’d like to know the answer to that, myself._

“Now, now. LET ME IN.”

The narrow door screeches open. Cold light touches her skin. She gawks up at a happy, smiling, permanently-affixed death grimace.

“I can _erase_ it,” he breathes down at her, chest heaving in his bloodlust. “I can make it go away. ALL OF IT.”

He swings the rod down, aims for her amygdala.

She ducks past him, bolts across the bathroom into a medical bay. Passes dozens of beds with giant restraints, not unlike the one around her neck. It’s heavy and cumbersome and she rips at it while she fights to provide her tortured lungs with air.

_ZZZZZzzzzZZZZZAAAAAP!_

“AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”

A fresh wave of high-voltage lightning rocks her off her feet, and she trips, chips her teeth and swallows the chunks, splatting to the broken tiles, a puppet without any tension in her limbs.

The Doctor drags his tool against the walls, scraping, sparking. 

“HOLD STILL and let me work on you, you fucking bitch!”

_Bitch? Is that your diagnosis, Doc or are you projecting?_

The slack abates as her nerves spring online. She somehow clambers to her feet, clawing at the walls for purchase, a grainy film reel of disturbing images behind her eyelids. Miniature theaters. And he is the cigarette carelessly flicked onto the pile of flammable celluloid.

“How does that feel? I think we have a _response_!”

Too slow. Wind whooshes past her ear and the rod makes agonizing contact, smashes into her shoulder and sends her flailing into a pallet. Her nerves shriek in place of her voice box; she’s stunned.

The doctor looms, observing with tilted head. She lays there drooling. He crouches and pulls her up, lifts her by the collar with an arm of solid ligaments. Stitching. Wires. He reeks of latex and liquid lead. Fried circuitry.

“Interesting choice of attire,” he remarks, his eyes flicking to her collar. “Theft is not permitted on these premises!”

He is utterly irrevocably insane. She goes limp, hangs off him while he gets to hanging **her**.

“Your mind is an open book, now,” he hisses. The last thing she hears before he throws her on a hook and her chest explodes with pain.

She dies.

**

And dies.

To the hag, face down in the mud with a mouthful of dirt. Meg and Adam popped the gen on purpose, tripped her, and ran off so they could use her as bait.

She triggered the trap by accident, and the rest, as they say, is a misery-tinged history.

**

And dies again.

To the Wraith, her brains bashed to jelly because Nancy jumped in a locker to heal herself and alerted the killer to her location.

At least it was a relatively quick death.

Relatively.

**

Fourth time’s the unlucky charm, and the winner is Freddy.

Slow, purposeful footsteps ring in the basement of the preschool, the _last_ place she wants to be, but the generator was untapped and no one was around the last time she checked, and now the dead kids are singing and she’s royally _fucked_.

“Your friends don’t seem to like you very much.

Two just left through the hatch without you.

The third I caught in the throat and dragged back out.”

The evidence drips, drizzles from his glove.

The Nightmare is much more observant than the other killers. He likes to rub on the dread and marinate in her fear.

He corners her easily against some hissing pipes. They scald her bare arms. She whimpers, but she has nowhere left to run. And those kids _won’t_ _stop_ _singing_.

“Just kill me and be done with it!” she barks. Wails.

She fixates on those razor-tipped blades, wondering how he’ll do it.

He smirks and lunges, shoving her against the heated pipes, and she never knew skin made that specific sound when it...sizzles. That wretched leathery face is right up close with hers and there’s an undeniable, fucked-up lust in those hemorrhaged eyes. She smells her own flesh burning, and a distant part of her wonders if he _wanted_ her to feel this specific kind of pain. He's definitely getting off on it, he's practically dry-humping her into the pipes and his breath is shallow and ragged.

She flinches as the needle tip of a blade flicks the clasp of her collar with a _ting!_

“This isn’t yours..."

_No shit._

“Boyfriend?” he sneers.

_I have no fucking idea._

“Do you _see_ anyone coming to rescue me?” she croaks.

He grins, and his eyes turn to black slits.

"No," he rejoices.

The back of her shirt is on fire. The acrid stink of her hair burning is going to make her puke all over this psycho manlet’s sweater.

“ _I’ll_ be your _boyfriend_ ,” he purrs, and it’s _not_ sexy coming from those cracked lips; it’s sticky and filth-ridden and perverse, all peepshow floors.

Before she can wrench her face away he forces himself on her, shoves a thick saliva-coated appendage that _used_ to be a tongue in her mouth, plugging her throat. 

She screams. He swallows.

The spidery claws on his left hand flex and sweeps his arm way, way back.

While they're still connected in such a breathless manner, he winks at her.

With a rip that goes on forever, he slashes down and _**up** , _shoves those impossibly long knives between her legs and tears into her, and he doesn’t stop until she’s waking up in the survivor’s woods screaming at the top of her lungs like an asylum prisoner on the brink of a complete mental breakdown.

_Fingered by fucking Freddy._

She curls into a little ball of trauma and groans _._

_Just my rotten luck._

Somewhere, not far off, a crow laughs heartily.

**

At some point—she can’t say exactly when, time is no longer a factor to her tortured existence—she revives.

It’s raining softly. Everything is soaking wet.

A tiny fire dances at her fingertips, above the sodden forest floor.

_How can there be a fire in the rain it makes no sense oh God I’m losing it._

She puts her hand over it, making sure she’s not hallucinating. It’s warm. Alive. Meek and small, but there’s potential there for a conflagration, if she can somehow _coax..._

She takes it into her palms, cupping the orange glow as one cups water. Its pulsating heartbeat flutters against her flesh.

_All right. You win. I can’t take it anymore._

She bites her finger til it gushes blood and feeds rubies to the flames. They hiss and swell, suckling on the offering.

She half expects it to not work, for this supernatural heart to cease beating and gutter out.

It doesn’t, although the world fades to black for a few seconds.

Then it explodes in HD color and grim detail in an industrial Big Bang.

She spawns into a freakshow factory filled with maniacal contraptions. Torture devices. The workings of a tireless, obsessed mind...but not his.

Staring at a pig mask on a shelf, into its slouched, hollow eyes, she is disappointed beyond measure with herself.

She has caved. She is, as Ash so eloquently put it, a 'fangirl'. But who else does she have, now, except him?

Then she hears it: a camera shutter.

**_Click! Click!_ **

She turns.

Wearing his traditional white mask, he lowers the camera. He waves a black-gloved hand at her, almost shy.

She cracks a smile.

But then he tucks the camera away, whips out his knife so fast his robes can't keep up, advancing on her, and her grin slips and plummets down the hole in the corner of the second floor, where she’s about to jump, and she hopes the fall breaks her spine because the way he’s pounding after her leaves no room for doubt.

She’s made a crucial mistake. A critical error in judgement. 

And now that ‘error’ is coming to kill her.

She jumps down the rabbit hole, doesn't land in Wonderland. Instead she cat-crouches in a disgusting bathroom where a cadaver lays between some toilets. She ignores it and runs into the hall. A thud sounds lightly where she landed, seconds ago.

Despite her best efforts, slinking from room to room, he finds her.

He always does.

She's standing in front of a spazzing television, where some poor soul with a contraption on his head sits in his chair, eternally vexed.

While she stares at all the ruin, that's when he comes darting around a corner with a whirl of his black cloak like he's fucking Batman. He dives and tackles her to the ground.

...She lets him. What's the point in fighting, anymore?

"Now, now. Where's that **spark** I love so much?" he accuses, and doesn't even have to wrestle her to get a nice, tight hold on her wrists. She submits willingly. She's been beaten into the ground too often.

“Wear the horns next time,” she sighs. His weight is at least comforting, even if all that accompanies it is suffering.

He lifts the mask so she can see his lips twitch into a smirk.

“Why?”

“It’s more honest, that way.”

“ _Anything_ for you.”

She reddens despite herself. His words sunburn her entire being. She wants him, badly. And he wants her, if she's not mistaking the pressure against her thigh for his knife.

With that he bends his head down and locks his arms. She braces for the stiff invasive agony of the blade. Instead his mouth seals hers, cuts off her air supply, and his tongue parts her lips, slides into her willing mouth. He swirls it once, a quick taste, before he pulls away and leaves her squirming with wet lips and even wetter panties.

"Good to see you again," he says jovially, and he's standing up and she's never been more confused (and horny, Jesus Christ, she wants him to fuck her right there on the dirty floor).

She scrapes to her feet, using a chain for support.

Her pupils are huge and blown out and he _really_ wants to snap a photo of those 'come fuck me' sapphires. But there's no time.

"I missed you."

The admission boils out of her and a tremendous weight lifts from her shoulders.

But her tenderness, her affection is all one-sided.

Slowly, in response, Danny lowers the mask. The last thing she sees is that smug, giddy grin, and she regrets saying those words. They have undammed some force, she isn't sure what. The devil's in the details and she can't worry about them right now.

Because he's charging at her yet again, slashing at her with blinding speed. The hit lands: he cuts a deep gouge in her side, and if she hadn't moved at the last second it would have cleaved her kidney in two.

She yelps, whirls, runs away out of sheer animal instinct, leaving a thick trail of spatter.

Danny lets her.

He cleans his knife, thinks the better of it, and follows the trail. Kneeling down, he dips two fingers in it, in _her_ , slips those fingers under his mask and rubs her essence on his lips, forks out his tongue and takes her into himself, swallowing, and that **alone** is almost worth all the overtime he's been putting in to craft their sordid story.

And it's almost time for the big reveal. The climax, if you will.

But first, a little more _tension_ is in store.


	11. Trou de Loup

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _She slides down, hands and knees, and claws for the medkit._
> 
> _He sends it spinning out of reach with a swift kick._
> 
> _“Ah ah! No you don’t! I want you just like you are now.”_
> 
> _And saunters off._
> 
> _Several ear-piercing screams and blackouts later, he returns. Soaked in the juices of his labor. And he’s so proud, isn’t he? The way he stands over her, wide-legged with his gloves on his hips._
> 
> _“Still alive?” he chirps. “Oh, good. That’s so good of you, hanging on for me like that. You saved yourself all for me.”_
> 
> _Flip of an escape switch, he goes from plucky to lecherous. And it works on her, damn her. Hammering, between her legs, a clamor only he can soothe._
> 
> _But there’s a snare to her newfound desire: she’s dying. Languishing, she floats in a sea of ice, her body wrapped in a cocktail of homemade anesthesia. Numb to it all...except his words._
> 
> _“I can’t feel,” she shivers. “I’m cold.”_
> 
> _He perks up, crossing his bold arms._
> 
> _“Well, that won’t do. Let’s see if I can help.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quick warning about this chapter to check the tags. Danny's personality is, er, shining at last. This one contains some descriptions of torture, as well as some smut.

They call it ‘The Game’, but that's a misnomer at best. A game is something you can win.

A gambit of cruel and unusual circumstance, the only way to escape this place is to play and suffer some kind of extreme, unfathomable torture. The price of freedom, as envisioned by a vengeful mind, passed down to a brainwashed apprentice.

A mimicry of the Entity’s realm, only smaller. A tightly-wound diorama. The enitre place is a booby trap, itching to spring at the slightest tremor.

Every breath feels like a mistake and all she wants is to forfeit.

But _fuck_ that.

He’s wounded her. Danny Johnson will **never** change his psychotic stripes. She hadn’t actually _expected_ him to change. She didn’t know what she’d hoped for by coming here.

She doesn’t know anything anymore. She’s drifting room to room—aimless, in dire need of a place to rest her tattered and torn body before she dissolves. Tiptoeing, mortified, through each torture chamber, clutching her injured side, searching for a generator (because fuck this and fuck Danny, she wants _out_ ) she nearly collides with the greatest trap of all:

Humans.

“Watch it! Oh, it’s you. _Qué puta suerte._ ” 

She nearly trips over Ace’s extended pant leg. He’s at a gen in a corner of the plant, hiding like the clever roach that he is.

Can she really blame him?

“Ace...” is all she can manage to squeeze out between her deflated lungs.

His taunt with the playing card seems an eternity ago. She's surprised she's actually found the weasel. _Which means he_ **_wants_ ** _to be seen, or I’ve caught him off-guard._ _And these dead pigs could fly..._

Clutching her bleeding abdomen, she slides against the wall in a heap of quivering limbs. Ace tilts his head, noting the blood. She braces for vitriol. A line of pity creases his winsome brow, his lips downturned in disgust or perturbation.

 _(Someone’s gonna have to shove a hook in that cardshark)._ David’s threat ripples from another world. Except she’s pretty sure that hadn’t been him in the woods. Only one person would have brought her a romantic gift and eyed her collar like a treat.

 _It can’t be. Impossible._ She gnaws her lip, eyes half-lidded, even in the midst of all this pain. _But then again, in this realm._

“What happened to you, kitten? Lover’s quarrel?” Ace sneers.

She bites her tongue, eyeing the purple medkit hanging off his Prada belt.

The numbers, the odds always catch up to him. He flips his sunglasses up on his oil-spill hair, glaring daggers at her.

“There are five of us here.” He stands up aggressively. “Tell me how the FUCK that’s possible! There’s always FOUR.”

“Ace,” she groans, reaching from the floor. “Think I could...get some of that gauze or somethin’...Dann-, er, Ghostface cut me deep.”

Thank God the gen’s sputtering, because he doesn’t catch her slip-up (or his poker face is _that_ perfect). She removes a slick hand. Blood gushes from the gash, sinks into the cracked concrete.

Ace pales at the sight, but he shakes his head. He storms over and takes her by the collar. He smells like some kind of tropical cologne, like a long-extinct paradise. It thinly masks the reek of fear seeping from his pores.

“There’s always FOUR,” he repeats tersely. “How are you here with us? TELL ME while you’re still alive.”

_TELL ME._

“Heal me first, motherfucker.”

He snarls and drops her against the wall. Starts to walk away...stops.

“I’m gonna regret this,” he sighs, saintlike.

“But you’re so _pathetic_ , kid. I can’t leave ya in the gutter.”

She’s too weak to express gratitude. Guilt and blood loss have made human remains of her. Ace kneels down, opens the rare medkit, and takes out a syringe full of bright green miracle-juice. 

“Isn’t that stuff usually pink?” she huffs. Her vision’s blurred. The shadows are vibrating. Moving.

Stalking them.

“New recipe of mine.”

Her lowers it to her arm. Sweet, sweet painkillers. He preps it for her, flicking the tip of the needle.

“Figured a redesign was necessary. Current events and all that.”

While she watches him lower it to her vein, one of those wavering shapes slinks out from behind some chemical barrels.

A shadow bearing a white, stretched face.

“One _final_ thing. Tell me how you got here,” he demands, softly. “And the medicine’s yours.”

She shakes her head and snatches at the plunger for herself. Her side is in agony. She can’t feel her fingers or toes.

He gnashes Domino-white teeth and whips it away. Lowers it again.

“Fine. Don’t tell me. YOU WIN. Here ya go sweetheart, you _deserve_ this.”

“Ace!” she moans, pointing.

Danny peels away from the wall and swoops. Rushes over and rips the syringe away before the man can even blink. Or push the drugs into her system.

The knife glimmers under the harsh industrial lights. Danny brandishes it between himself and Ace while he twirls the syringe. He has magician’s hands.

“You kids shooting up down here, and you didn’t invite me?” he smirks from behind the plastic. 

“Or did you want her for yourself? I can’t blame you.”

She swears he’s licking his lips under that mask. Ace looks ready to cash out, quit town.

“I mean, look at her,” he sneers. “Honey, you’re a _vision_ when you’re bleeding out in front of me.”

“Fuck you both!” Ace snarls, and tries to run.

Danny stomps in his path, a solid wall. Ace reads him quick and raises his fists, the medkit, lunging, trying to bash him right in that stupid mask.

She stares transfixed at the two, thinks the better of it, and starts to crawl away. Leaves a slug-trail of crimson smears. Oh well. She has to try...

Behind her, sounds of a violent struggle ensue. Ace bellows and there’s scrapes, scuffles.

Her side weeps. She cannot crawl any further. She pulls herself into a pile of crates and prays she’s camouflaged.

“Know what my **_favorite_ ** playing card is?” she hears Danny sneer as Ace snarls something incomprehensible.

By his rage, he’s figured it out, too. She just doesn’t fully understand _how_. But ‘David’ is the key.

“It’s the two of spades. Know **_why_ **?” he hisses.

“Ggg!” Ace chokes out.

Their dueling shades entangle, separate over and over on the wall.

A snap and a tear of expensive silk cloth, and something sprays. Silence. Then, his rapidfire footsteps echo louder and louder towards her.

Danny sings, “It’s the friendship card! I’ve always been a people person.”

 _God, but he’s insane_.

Ace is having the same revelation. He collapses on his knees in front of her, having followed her trail. His arm hangs, limp, useless, bloodied up to the shoulder.

“You’re in league with this fuck,” he rattles off, jabbing a red finger at her. “He knew about the card! I’ll be telling the others everything and when you return, _oh you_ , you had better **_pray-_ ** _”_

Danny snatches him by the collar and hoists the full-grown man to his heels. He puts the big needle against Ace’s jugular, but doesn’t prick him.

She gawks, then shuts her mouth. At her betrayed expression, Danny chuckles with gusto. Ace goes pale as a jellyfish.

“That’s _right_ ,” Danny growls gleefully, shaking him. “You’re gonna get a taste of your own medicine.”

Fire leaps to her eyes in lieu of her leaping to her feet.

“You were going to _poison_ me?”

Ace shrugs. He puckers his lips and smooches loudly at her.

“Nothing personal, sweetheart. But it’s shit teammates like you that get a man killed. Exhibit A.”

He lifts his chin to indicate himself, and his apathy at his impending demise nearly breaks her. But she’s too pissed and too ashamed to admit she hadn't even suspected him to fully give up.

With that, Danny sticks him—empties the whole dose into his artery—and he collapses. Dead as a doornail.

“Good riddance. Don’t you hate gambling addicts?”

Danny reaches in his pants pocket, takes out a black Ace of Spades and shoves it in the corpse’s gaping mouth. He takes out his camera, steps back, and snaps a shot of her reclined with the dead gambler lying prostrate at her feet.

“Danny,” she breathes. Her blood is spilling onto a box of mannequin parts, trickling to the floor. The plant thirsts for her.

It’s not the only one.

“Wait here. I’ll be right back, **love** ,” he bids. Can barely contain himself.

She slides down, hands and knees, and claws for the medkit.

He sends it spinning out of reach with a swift kick.

“Ah ah! No you don’t! I want you **just like you are now**.”

And saunters off.

Several ear-piercing screams and blackouts later, he returns. Soaked in the juices of his labor. And he’s so proud, isn’t he? The way he stands over her, wide-legged with his gloves on his hips.

“Still alive?” he chirps. “Oh, good. That’s _so good_ of you, hanging on for me like that. You **saved** yourself all for **me**.”

Flip of an escape switch, he goes from plucky to lecherous. And it works on her, damn her. Hammering, between her legs, a clamor only he can soothe.

But there’s a snare to her newfound desire: she’s dying. Languishing, she floats in a sea of ice, her body wrapped in a cocktail of homemade anesthesia. Numb to it all...except his words.

“I can’t feel,” she shivers. “I’m cold.”

He perks up, crossing his bold arms.

“Well, that won’t do. Let’s see if I can help.”

He scoops her up bridal style and-

-carries her straight towards a hook.

It's too late to dismantle this situation. Something is going to give, and that something is her. But maybe she can begin to take apart the Rubix cube of his mind, use it to her advantage, some day.

Mostly, she speaks next because she has nothing left to lose, and that has afforded her a beggar's clarity.

"How are you able to speak to me, in my head?" she asks.

He chuckles, patting her rump. Nearly to the hook now.

"You're delusional, but that's okay. I still love you."

_Except I know you're lying and you know what you're doing._

"You said you could see me in my dreams."

"Maybe you dreamed the whole thing," he suggests. So helpful, this psycho.

She blacks out for a second. Comes to, still curled against him.

“You were a journalist?” the words drift from her like tiny spirits from a cracked tomb.

“Hmm?”

“A writer. Before.”

Talking up his already swollen ego, he expands like a balloon.

“Yesss. I was freelanced. More opportunity that way. Room to **_roam_** ,” he sighs deeply, all bitterness and nostalgia, and oh, she’ll remember that, later.

“You...need a...dictionary.”

He stops dead. A rusty sacrificial hook squeaks above her.

“Why’s that?”

His chest vibrates laughter into her empty one, but there’s an irked undertone. He’s getting impatient.

“Because you don’t seem to know the definition of ‘help’.”

“...”

He drops her like a stone, and the air compresses from her lungs as she lands on her side. Danny rips his mask off, and his cheeks are blazed pink. Waspish fury glints in those twin inkwells.

He’s panting. Hot. Perspiration lines his brow and she wants, even in extremis, to lick it off and swallow his salt. She still can’t tell what he wants more: to kill her or fuck her. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.

A last resort, she rolls onto her back in supplication, pleading, “Please...don’t.”

But her bared neck and torso have only served to rouse his poorly-repressed desires. He hoists her and throws her on the hook. She screams, but it scrapes her spine, impaling her shirt instead. It twists and cuts off her circulation, yanking up and granting him a perfect glimpse of her pale, flat tummy and belly button.

“Now _that’s_ a sight I’ll never get tired of seeing,” he simpers.

He’s on her, lifting her by the pelvis while she dangles like a treat. He begins by kissing around the delicacy of her exposed navel, tracing with the knife, but not cutting. Each stamp from his lips sends an electric jolt through her and she’s sopping wet, her nipples hardened to buds through the thin material of her bralet and her sad excuse for a shirt.

“Look at you,” he breathes, “offering yourself to me instead of the Entity. But I think I’ve more than _earned_ this.”

 _As if I have a better choice,_ she seethes. _And he hasn’t earned jack shit._

She keeps her rage to herself. He rips her shoes and pants off in one fluid motion, keeping her seated against his rock-hard groin. She has just enough strength to keep her legs anchored around his waist, but he does most of the heavy lifting.

“Save the best for last, right?” he huffs. The redness stretches down his neck, past the wide collar of his black frock.

“Usually I don’t get this much time with the bodies. Not unless I want it.”

Her stomach flips. 

...She wants to see him naked, pull all him against all of her, but she knows he won’t allow it. Not yet.

“I know you’ve got better lines than that,” she half-jokes, half-sobs, because she’s still _scared to death_ in all this. She’s not fooled by the brief break in his usual onslaught.

Lucky for her he’d rather be doing something else with his tongue. Her poor, soaked panties are next on the executioner’s slab. Two neat nicks of the blade and he steals them. They disappear.

Then he hoists her exposed, plump lower half and gets her peach right where he wants it, in front of his lips, and hot breath caresses her for a few seconds. He drags the honed blade—up, down, around—tickling her thighs, savoring her shudders and squirms. He parts her cleft with his tongue, gets a proper taste for the first time.

Her blood was just an appetizer.

He treats her clit to some precise, quick nudges, swirling expert strokes that get her moaning on that fucking hook in a way she _never_ thought possible. Her body shoots signals of ecstasy that crash, disjointed, with the pain radiating from her side and shoulders.

 **Pain** , yes, and still plenty more to follow. It’s impossible to separate it from him; they are a packaged deal.

Right before she can finish, he withdraws and clamps down on the inside of her thigh with his teeth, nearly tears a chunk out of her. She throws her her head back and her shriek echoes throughout the labyrinth.

With a satisfied growl he gives her other thigh the same awful treatment, grants her a set of raw, butterflied impressions, and her screams and feeble thrashes almost make him spill too soon against the torturous friction of his jeans.

He wants nothing more than to be inside her, but that is not the will of the Entity. Much of its will goes against what he wants, and he has to be careful how he plays his cards. But he can still have a little fun with her. She belongs to him, after all.

She’s whining now, pitting her bottom half against him, desperate for an orgasm, for a few seconds of relief from all the screaming areas of flesh.

“Go on,” he orders, speaking against her soft pussy lips. Hovering just above where she aches the most.

“ ** _Beg_** _,_ and I’ll give you want you want.”

Some of it. He knows better than to spoil her with her life.

“Please, Danny, oh _please_ ,” she cries. She’s actually crying: hiccuped, ugly sobs with tears rolling like rain. She doesn’t want this to stop. What morbidity awaits on the other end of this double-faced coin she doesn’t remember flipping, has forgotten the name of this game, this treachery.

Satisfied, he nips her tender flesh down there, drawing blood, then uses it to paint her clit and lets her buck and grind against his face until she comes with a defeated, high-pitched moan and her sweet juices surge down his collar, coating his leather.

He never wants to take it off. Licking his lips, he sets her limp legs down and wipes his mouth on his sleeve out of necessity more than want.

She doesn’t even see him take out the knife. It materializes inches front of her nose.

“Well? What do you say?” 

He taps the tip of her nose with the most sinister end.

“T-thank you,” she warbles.

“ _Danny_ . Say my name. _Please_ ,” he adds at the last second. As if manners are all that matter.

She hesitates, unwilling to continue their bizarre ritual. Spitting in his eye seems like the better option. But it won’t change the outcome or his mind. Regardless, she sucks her tongue, gathers as much as she can and spits with all her might.

He catches it in his mouth with one gulp and smiles adoringly up at her, her blood on his teeth, and it's the most disturbing (sexy) thing she's ever seen.

“I just _love_ having you inside me,” he gushes. “But I’d rather be inside of **you**.”

 _Bastard._ She groans disgust at him, at herself. How he laughs and laughs, taking a second to polish his blade, remove any crust dulling its sweet, sweet edge.

Better give him what he wants. Best to stay on his metaphorical good side. She can fake complacency. She **must**.

“ _Danny_ ,” she says, stabbing her wounded pride through the heart. “Thank you.”

“Hmph.”

He ignores her. Her relief crumbles, turns to deepest dread. The knife is clean and shiny and he is examining it with a velociraptor’s keen interest. Entertaining endless possibilities, and a shadow falls across her face. His eyes are dark portals to the machinations within.

She opens her mouth to scream as he descends and, for much longer than the Entity requires, makes those dark dreams a wicked, agonized reality.

**Author's Note:**

> Haven't written anything in a while, but I wanted to pay homage to everyone's favorite stalky boi.
> 
> A couple chapters planned, several are written. Will post as I go/feel inspired.


End file.
